Opinion: STAT+: Pharma and biotech leaders are destroying their own industry

In early 2025, biotech experienced a “Deep Seek moment” when biotech and pharma leaders alike realized how quickly China was gaining ground with innovation, speed of drug development, and share of licensing deals. In 2020, global pharmaceutical companies spent about $9 billion on licensed drug assets from China. In 2025, that number shot to more than $137 billion. The first two months of 2026 alone accounted for nearly $50 billion in deals. As a December 2025 report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology put it, “in just three years, China’s biopharmaceutical industry rose from near irrelevance to dominance.” China’s rise is happening with the blessing of U.S. pharmaceutical executives, who are allowing their own industry to be destroyed. I am a co-chair of a working group at the Council on Foreign Relations investigating the U.S.’s generic pharmaceutical dependence on China. An estimated 60% of our generic medications have an active ingredient that originates in China; some estimates have this figure as high as 80-90%. (The exact percentage is unknown because the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t formally track this information, and because a significant percentage of our drugs are imported from India, which in turn imports chemical precursors from China.)Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…