Sino-Singapore Health｜Professor Emeritus of Harvard Medical School: China’s drug research and development has entered a new stage

China News Service, Beijing, October 28 (Luo Chunhao) In recent years, the topic of China’s innovative drugs going overseas has been hot.

According to statistics from the NextPharma database, China's innovative drugs completed 94 license-out transactions in 2024, with a total disclosed transaction amount of US$51.9 billion; in 2025, the number of transactions increased to 157, and the total transaction amount reached US$135.655 billion. In the first half of 2026, the total value of China’s innovative drug licensing transactions (License-out) has reached US$99.7 billion, nearly double that of the whole of 2024.

Gregory L. Verdine, a serial entrepreneur and senior venture capitalist in the field of biotechnology and emeritus professor of Harvard Medical School, recently said in a media interview in Beijing that China's drug research and development has entered a new stage, especially in the field of drug discovery with the blessing of artificial intelligence. This highly complex and engineering work is exactly what Chinese drug R&D companies are good at. At the same time, this intersects with China’s other capabilities, such as scale, manufacturing, drug screening and AI capabilities. The combination of these capabilities puts China at the forefront of drug research and development in this field.

He believes that although most of the current overseas license-out transactions for China's innovative drugs involve targets that have long been discovered or even have drugs on the market, Chinese pharmaceutical companies can significantly improve the performance of these drugs. Therefore, although most targets are not first-in-class, the drugs themselves still have better properties.

Gregory L. Verdine reminded that in the future, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to continue improving drugs around these long-discovered targets. China needs to take greater risks in target selection in the next step. Scientific ability is not an obstacle. The key lies in whether the capital market can accommodate this risk. At the 2026 China Pharmaceutical Policy Makers Summit, many overseas innovative pharmaceutical companies also believed that improving the quality of pipelines rather than blindly coding quantity will be a topic of greater concern in the future.

However, Gregory L. Verdine said that he believes that some Chinese pharmaceutical companies are moving towards the top ten in the world. Some pharmaceutical companies have found a feasible path to success. Although they are currently mainly doing best-in-class rather than first-in-class, they have the funds, ambition and talent to shift from best-in-class to first-in-class.