China Learned from Us — and We Can Learn from Them
Leslie Williams, biotech entrepreneur and board member
Over the last decade, China-based biotech companies learned from the best —us.
They studied how the US biotech ecosystem was built: a fusion of basic science, venture capital, and entrepreneurial risk-taking. They learned how our scientists turned NIH-funded discoveries into startups, how our venture model backed innovation years before potential profit, and how collaboration between academia, biotech, and pharma fueled breakthroughs from recombinant proteins to RNA medicines.
They saw how a science-based regulatory agency fostered confidence in marketed products, and how transparent stock markets protected investors and helped them best allocate capital toward promising companies. They saw the key infrastructure at work and sought to build it for themselves.
Through it all, they followed the science.
They observed how U.S. biotech created platform companies around novel modalities — mRNA, gene editing, t-RNA therapeutics, and CAR-T — and they built their own. They watched how we used CROs to increase efficiency and flexibility, then scaled that concept into global networks that now serve the entire industry. They understood that innovation requires speed, capital efficiency, and quality — and they applied those lessons with relentless intensity. They brought a can-do engineering mindset to the task.
While Chinabuilt up its innovative capacity, it also played to its existing strengths. China continued to invest in large-scale global manufacturing capacity that the US once dominated, but no longer does. While the US was debating drug pricing and health insurance policy over the past decade, China was building bioparks, GMP facilities, and end-to-end supply chains that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
They trained their scientists abroad in the US and Europe, and recruited many to return home with a deep understanding of the science — and a national mission to lead in it.
Now, 10 years later, they are good. Very good.
They are not just manufacturing efficiently; they are developing medicines faster. Chinese biotech companies are aggressively licensing assets to the West — antibodies, cell therapies, and novel oncology drugs — moving them into patients at a pace that outstrips the US regulatory and development cycle. Take bispecific antibodies: while we’ve spent years refining and testing our constructs, Chinese developers can take a similar design, tweak the sequence, and advance to first-in-human studies within months. They’ve turned speed into a strategic advantage.
And it’s time we learn from them.
From China, we can learn how to prioritize scale and speed without losing sight of science. We can learn how to move a molecule from concept to clinic in half the time, through coordinated teams, decisive leadership, and streamlined regulatory alignment. They’ve shown what’s possible when national strategy, capital, and execution converge behind a scientific goal.
But we must not forget what makes the US unique — our freedom to think differently. Innovation here comes from friction: the clash of ideas, the courage to challenge convention, the belief that failure is part of discovery. If we spend the next decade simply trying to compete with China on cost or manufacturing capacity, we’ll lose sight of what we are good at — that creative spark.
The reasons we struggle to compete in manufacturing are deeply woven into our national fabric — labor unions, complex zoning, and a society that still sees biopharma with some suspicion. We value individual rights and environmental safeguards — and we should — but they make it challenging to match China’s speed and efficiency. That’s not a weakness; it’s a reflection of who we are. But we must be honest about what that means.
Yet this dependence on China for manufacturing has a cost. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how fragile global supply chains can be — and how vulnerable we become when critical drug components or manufacturing capabilities lie overseas. We can’t afford that risk again.
To safeguard national security and ensure access to essential medicines, we must invest in building and maintaining advanced biomanufacturing capacity here at home — not to replace global partnerships, but to create redundancy and resilience. Backup plants, regional hubs, and flexible production networks across the US could protect both innovation and preparedness.
This will require public–private coordination, new incentives, and policy frameworks that make it viable to build and sustain manufacturing on US soil. This means leveraging strengths of world-leading biotech clusters like Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, while building stronger alliances with other US regions that have their own scientific assets and room to ramp up domestic manufacturing. We should approach this not as isolationism, but as smart insurance — ensuring that when global systems falter, our science and supply remain strong.
Our challenge is to protect our innovation engine while ensuring biosecurity and maintaining global leadership. Recent US policies designed to limit Chinese investment and partnerships may improve national security — but if applied too broadly, they could isolate our science, fragment our supply chains, and slow our ability to deliver life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the capital markets in Hong Kong are robust, and Chinese biotech doesn’t need capital from American investors to continue making progress.
Let’s remember what’s at stake. Many of today’s breakthrough therapies — from PD-1 antibodies to RNA vaccines to cell therapies — were developed through global collaboration. Manufacturing in Shenzhen, clinical trials in Australia, reagents from Shanghai, analytics from San Diego — these efforts save lives, not based on nationality or race, but on shared human purpose. The medicine your child, spouse, or parent may need tomorrow could be born from both American discovery and Chinese delivery.
A wise leader knows what they are good at and what they are not — and partners to fill the gaps. The US excels at discovery, translational and clinical insight, and the courage to pioneer. China excels at speed, cost, and execution. We should protect what’s uniquely ours — our innovation — while respecting and leveraging what they’ve built.
If we choose to compete wisely and collaborate thoughtfully, we can create a symbiosis that accelerates global health. That’s not naïveté — that’s pragmatism rooted in hope.
Because in the end, the true competition isn’t between nations.
It’s between disease and time.
And I, for one, am holding on to a hope that won’t fade.
