Don’t sleep on China’s academic innovation: a Perspective

It’s time to move beyond the narrative that China primarily excels at second-order innovation: This is clear from where I sit as head of BioCentury’s scientific literature monitoring team. Whether members of the local ecosystem will be the ones to capitalize on the novel biology coming out of Chinese universities is less clear. But Westerners who sleep on this are going to miss the train.

China has become an undisputed source of “innovation on innovation,” with Western partners lining up to tap the country’s biotechs for next-generation versions of emerging therapeutic modalities, such as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and bispecific antibodies...