China is redefining time-to-clinic, and it could be transformational: a Perspective

Among the many ways that China is making its mark on biotech, one stands out for the promise of broad and lasting change to drug development: the speed of generating first-in-human data. As companies embrace, and other countries respond to the newly raised bar, you can start to imagine a world where preclinical development is reduced to just one parameter in the process, rather than the rate-limiting bottleneck in going from idea to product.

That alone could change the dynamics of drug development. It won’t alter the need for rigorous proof-of-concept trials, but it can shrink the years and money spent gathering animal data that too frequently has little predictive value. Together with the prospect of AI improving probability of success in finding the right molecule, there could be a very different calculus for early-stage investment in a matter of years...