China's biotech sector has spent the past few years moving fast — and one senior Pfizer executive thinks that pace is about to change.
According to Endpoints News, Pfizer's Andrew Baum predicts that China's rapid advance in biotech will slow as companies there begin experimenting at the cutting edge of research and development. His reasoning, as reported by Endpoints, is that the inherent risks of biology and drug development will start to bite once Chinese firms push past well-trodden ground and into the R&D frontier.
The distinction matters. Much of the recent surge in Chinese drug development has involved working in areas where the underlying science is already reasonably well understood — where the target is known and the question is one of execution, speed and cost. That is a game China's biotech industry has played very effectively. The frontier is a different proposition: when nobody knows whether a biological hypothesis holds up, failure rates climb, and no amount of operational efficiency guarantees a drug that works.
Baum's view is a forecast, not a verdict, and it comes from an executive at a large Western pharmaceutical company — a competitor to, and increasingly a customer of, the Chinese biotechs in question. Endpoints reports his prediction without indicating a timeline for the slowdown he anticipates.
Why it matters: Western drugmakers have been reshaping their pipelines around the assumption that Chinese biotech will keep advancing quickly, so a senior Pfizer executive publicly betting on a slowdown is a signal about how the industry's biggest players are reading the competitive landscape — and where they expect the next decade of drug discovery to be won.