China's rise in manufacturing has rarely been associated with drug discovery. That, quietly, is starting to change - giving "Made in China" a new chemistry. Today, China ranks second only to the United States in the number of new drugs under development, with its pipeline accounting for more than one-fifth of the global total.
Since 2021, over 110 homegrown innovative drugs have received market approval in China, representing more than half of all new drug approvals during that period. According to Pharmcube, a pharmaceutical consultancy, China surpassed the United States in the number of original drugs developed between 2015 and 2024, cementing its place among the world's leading innovators in pharmaceuticals. Over that decade, the cumulative value of overseas licensing deals involving Chinese innovative drugs exceeded 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars. Eighteen China-developed original medicines were approved abroad, with several outperforming foreign-origin drugs in head-to-head clinical trials. These results highlight the transformation of China's pharmaceutical sector, which was once dominated by imitative medicines, commonly referred to in the industry as "me-too" or "me-better" drugs.
To foster high-quality innovation, China has been strengthening regulatory support to propel its pharmaceutical industry beyond imitation and toward original discovery. China's drug regulatory reform, launched in earnest in 2015, has introduced fast-track pathways for breakthrough therapies, conditional approvals, and priority reviews, compressing timelines across the drug-development cycle. The country joined the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use in 2017 to align its drug-approval standards with international norms. Average review times for innovative-drug clinical trials have been slashed by over half, to 50 days in 2024 from 108 in 2018. Last year, the review of China's innovative-drug applications took an average of 225 days, or just 162 days under priority review. Since 2018, the National Medical Products Administration has approved 265 innovative drugs, including 68 by November 2025, more than six times the total approved in all of 2018.