China biotech boom leaves U.S. scrambling

from AXIOS:

China biotech boom leaves U.S. scrambling

By Adriel Bettelheim and Maya Goldman

Illustration of a pill, with one side featuring a Chinese flag and a much smaller side featuring an American flag

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

China is now setting the pace in life sciences R&D, conducting more clinical trials than the U.S. and licensing new discoveries to American companies.

The big picture: Beijing has become a linchpin in global drug development, the result of a decade-long national strategy to develop a biopharmaceutical industry.

Where it stands: China has surpassed the U.S. in drug clinical trials, per a report from GlobalData, marking a turning point in the global race to dominate the life sciences.

An independent, bipartisan commission told Congress last month that China is beating the U.S. in advanced biotech and that policymakers need to pour significant resources into the sector over the next five years to keep up.
Some experts say the Trump administration’s cuts to NIH and university-based biomedical research risk putting the U.S. further behind when it should be supporting work on drugs targeting cancer and other conditions and outbreaks like the avian flu.

By the numbers: In 2024, China listed more than 7,100 clinical trials in the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. The U.S. listed about 6,000 trials.

Beijing and Shanghai had more laboratory and R&D space under construction at the end of 2024 than any other global markets, with Boston in a distant third place, according to an April report from CBRE.

Between the lines: Cheaper labor and less regulation have shifted drug discovery from the U.S. to China. The investment bank Stifel projects 37% of big pharmaceutical companies’ licensed molecules will come from China this year.

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Recruiting doctors to hone AI models

By Erin Brodwin

Photo illustration of Jay Parkinson surrounded by abtsract lines, binary code, circles, and stethoscopes.

Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Courtesy of Jay Parkinson

Jay Parkinson spent nearly 20 years creating health tech companies before burning out and abandoning the field. Then, a sea change in AI brought him back.

Why it matters: His new venture, Automate.clinic, recruits doctors to hone AI models for health care at a time when questions are emerging about the tech’s ability to provide accurate medical answers, Erin Brodwin wrote first on Axios Pro. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity:

What made you decide to create Automate.clinic?

While [generative] AI models are great for consumer applications, they’re not great for health care. The data they’re being trained on is consumer information and electronic health record data, and it doesn’t always reflect what happens in the real world.

So I started to ask: What’s the role doctors play in developing these things?

How do you see doctors being involved?

Take AI scribes. When a doctor using it says, “This is a terrible output,” we’d plug into that feed, collect those thumbs-down clinical cases, and present those to a doctor on our end to review.

Then they can determine whether it’s a hallucination, a bias, a factual error, and correct it — but also provide clinical reasoning and link to clinical guidelines.

Who are your target customers?

Any AI company building their own model based on their own data.

How do you plan on recruiting and retaining doctors?

If you can combine two things — meaningful and flexible — it gets at something doctors don’t want to leave.

from STAT:

May 29, 2025

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politics

HHS cancels massive Moderna contract for flu pandemic vaccines

HHS has notified Moderna that it is canceling a nearly $600 million contract with the company to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus, STAT’s Helen Branswell reports.

The move, while anticipated as a possibility since February, will be seen as a serious blow to the country’s capacity to respond to pandemic influenza. No other flu vaccine production approach can produce doses with the speed of the messenger RNA platform used by Moderna and other companies that work with mRNA. Read more from Helen.

from Politico:

WHO COVID WARNING — A new Covid-19 variant is circulating in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asian and Western Pacific regions as global rates of the virus rise, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

Since mid-February, Covid-test positivity rates have increased globally, the organization said, reaching a peak on May 11 similar to that in July 2024, mainly driven by cases in regions most impacted by the new variant.

The WHO said that publicly available wastewater data from European countries and North America shows cases remain low as of mid-May. The CDC’s surveillance data also shows that case counts remain low, and the new variant, N.B.1.8.1, isn’t listed as driving cases.

The emerging variant comes as HHS says it will no longer recommend routine Covid vaccination for “healthy” children and pregnant women.

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China biotech boom leaves U.S. scrambling

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HHS cancels massive Moderna contract for flu pandemic vaccines

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