China's Clinical Trial Boom

In January, the Chinese company Deepseek released a reasoning AI model, called R1, that performs comparably to OpenAI's GPT-4o Turbo model on certain AI benchmarks but was developed with fewer resources at a much lower cost. Marc Andreessen called it “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” even as NVIDIA’s stock plummeted by 17 percent — the largest ever one-day loss for a U.S. company. While China’s AI competitiveness may have blindsided the tech world, the pharmaceutical industry has already had quite a few “DeepSeek Moments” of its own. About one-fourth of all clinical trials and early drug development now happens in China. Large pharmaceutical companies in-license about a third of their experimental molecules from Chinese laboratories (meaning they purchase the rights to molecules developed by other research groups rather than discover them in-house), according to a report by Stifel. Just a couple of years ago, this number was about 10 percent. "Te ... Read full article.