Is America coming for China's pharma sector? It soon might

Trump's tariff won't hurt Chinese drugmakers but that may change

- JULIANA LIU

The US has a record of closing its market to Chinese challengers.

(GETTY)

Because of the way Chinese pharmaceutical companies do business with the US, they're largely exempt from President Donald Trump's recently announced 100% levy on patented drugs.

Yet, it's too soon to breathe easy. A slew of regulatory risks from Washington persists for an industry that simultaneously enjoys a deeply interdependent relationship with its American partners while also being seen as an existential threat.

In January, DeepSeek surprised the world by introducing a low cost but effective open-source large language model. Last September, China's drugmakers had their own DeepSeek moment. That's when a local upstart outdid in a clinical trial a top-selling medication, a widely used cancer drug called Keytruda from Merck.

Patients using the new treatment, called Ivonescimab, went for more than 11 months before their tumours began to grow again, compared with just under six months for Keytruda, which is expected to bring in sales of $30 billion this year. Shares in Miami-based Summit Therapeutics-which had licensed the drug from Chinese firm Akeso to be commercialized in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan-soared, even as the therapy still needs to be approved by American regulators.