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Opinion: STAT+: 4 ideas to kick-start U.S. drug research — and beat China in biotech
“There's no reason the U.S. can't pick up the pace to match the global clinical research front-runners without compromising safety,” write Brian Finrow and Sandeep Patel.
China’s rise in biotechnology is no longer a distant possibility — it’s here. Last year, Chinese firms accounted for over a third of all Big Pharma acquisitions globally. These companies offer something America’s bloated drug development ecosystem increasingly struggles to deliver: speed. That makes them a low-cost biopharma disruptor, and it should be a wake-up call.
The U.S. still leads in basic science and biotech innovation, but it is dragging a regulatory and operational anchor behind it. Eroom’s Law — Moore’s Law spelled backward — was coined by researcher Jack Scannell to describe the stubborn decline in R&D efficiency in pharma. It takes longer and costs more to get less.
The accounting firm Deloitte’s most recent report on industry research productivity confirms these dismal claims. Between 2013 and 2024, the biopharma industry’s average return on investment fell from 6.5% to just 4.1%, while the average cost to develop a single drug rose from $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion.
