Big Take China Tests the Limits in the Race for Biotech Power
Nov 18, 2025
Karoline Kan, a Bloomberg Asia health reporter, and Andy Greenfield, a geneticist from Oxford, delve into China's ambitious biotech drive. They discuss the country’s heavy investments in gene-editing animals to develop therapies, like gene-edited pigs modeling ALS. The conversation highlights ethical challenges, regulatory gaps, and the cultural divide in attitudes toward animal research. They also touch on the low translation rate of animal studies to human therapies and China's growing status as a supplier of lab animals.
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China's Strategic Shift To Innovative Biotech
- China is shifting from generic drugs to developing proprietary, gene-based therapies to capture higher revenues.
- Gene-edited large animals are central to that strategy because they can better mimic human diseases for drug testing.
Pig Model Led To An ALS Drug
- Professor Jia Yichang failed to model ALS in mice but succeeded after gene-editing a pig that developed ALS-like symptoms and died a year later.
- That pig model led to a drug, Snug01, approved by the FDA for human trials this year.
Large Animals Fill Rodent Model Gaps
- China has expanded gene editing into larger species including monkeys, pigs and dogs to accelerate drug discovery.
- These larger models aim to replicate complex neurological and developmental disorders that rodents can't model well.