Immunotherapy drugs is where most of the cancer drug research is at today. American companies have already had some miraculous success stories, but there is plenty of room for new drugs. Until recently Chinese companies have been mostly satisfied in copying Western medications and synthesizing herbal medications. However, recently they’ve been getting into the game on their own and even researching new immunotherapy drugs.

So far they have only been marketing these new immunotherapy drugs within China. But if they’re found to be successful, with few nasty side effects, you can bet they’ll make it to other countries, even though they will require a lengthy approval process. America is the largest market for cancer drugs in the world and several Chinese companies are already inking deals with American companies to bring some of these drugs here. Right now there are over 228 companies in the U.S. researching immunotherapy drugs, China is #2 with 34 companies¹ . As of February 2019 there were 331 PD‐1 monoclonal antibody studies registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, of these 52 were being conducted in China. By November 2019 there 227 studies on PD-1 drugs in China alone!

With its large population, China has a very large number of new cases of cancer each year, nearly 4 million (compared to 1.7 million in the U.S.) This gives them a large internal market for any new drugs developed. Since June 2018 both Opdivo (nivolumab) and Keytruda (pembrolizumab) have been approved for specific cancers in China. But the high cost of these drugs is further incentive for local pharmaceuticals to get into the game.

These are legitimate new players in the market and any use of these drugs in the U.S., or other countries, will require approval of the local authorities (such as the FDA in the U.S.) However, some people may not be able to wait and may try to travel to China for medical tourism. China has recently approved cell therapy where that take the patients own T-cells and engineer them to fight cancer. There are very legitimate uses for such treatment, and such therapy is being used in the U.S. However, China has had problems in the past with unapproved facilities selling unproven cell therapy treatments². The new law is suppose to help better regulate this process.

All in all, having China enter this marketplace can only be beneficial. It stimulates competition and eventually makes most of the safe and effective new therapies available to everyone (but only after more rigorous testing).