China's Ahead In New Pharma Race: Own Meds, Don't Just Make Them

The point is not that China has displaced the United States at the top of drug innovation. It has not. Rather, Chinese firms are increasingly originating the assets that move through the pharmaceutical value chain instead of simply manufacturing them.

India is also becoming a larger center for clinical research. WHO data reported by the BMJ show that India accounted for 23% of global trial registrations between January 2024 and June 2025, behind China at 24%. WHO's latest data also show South-East Asia's trial numbers rising rapidly, driven largely by India.

The harder question is what India captures from that growth. NITI Aayog estimates that Indian pharmaceutical companies spend about 7% of net sales on research and development, against 15% to 20% for global companies. Indian life-sciences patent filings rose from 440 in 2013 to 3,576 in 2023, while China recorded 61,617 and the US 31,977. NITI still identifies weak R&D intensity as a constraint on India's entry into biologics, biosimilars and advanced therapies.

A column by the founder of Indian biotech company PopVax and a professor at the Takshashila Institution estimated that India conducts fewer than 40 first-in-human Phase I trials of novel pharmaceuticals each year, compared with more than 1,000 in China and 800 in the US. The figures are estimates rather than official government counts, but they point to an important distinction between hosting clinical research and originating new drugs.

New Delhi knows the problem. Biopharma SHAKTI commits 100 billion rupees ($1.05 billion) over five years to strengthen India's biopharmaceutical ecosystem, including a network of more than 1,000 accredited clinical-trial sites. Last week, the Health Ministry said industry consultations, training workshops and work on stronger data systems and a site-accreditation framework were already under way.

This infrastructure can help create an Indian innovation ecosystem, or merely make India a more efficient execution layer for somebody else's. The difference lies in who designs studies, analyses the evidence, owns the investigational asset and negotiates the licence.

It is tempting, then, to reduce this contest to a simple proposition: who owns the data owns the medicine. The reality is more complicated. Clinical data do not have a single owner in any straightforward sense.

International Good Clinical Practice rules distinguish source records maintained by investigators and institutions from data reported to sponsors, while placing obligations on both sides to protect participant privacy and preserve data integrity. India's Digital Personal Data Protection regime, operationalized through new rules in November 2025, strengthens limits around the collection and use of personal information.

These safeguards matter but privacy protection is not the same as economic sovereignty. Protocol design, pooled datasets, biostatistics, regulatory dossiers, patents and licensing rights sit at different points in the chain. A country can protect a participant's personal information while capturing relatively little of the downstream commercial value.

The strategic question is therefore not simply where data is stored. It is who has the institutions and expertise to turn evidence into a drug asset.

The more useful test is what participation in global research leaves behind. Does it strengthen domestic science and help local firms turn research into commercially valuable drugs and intellectual property, or does a country remain primarily a source of patients, trial sites and data for innovation systems headquartered elsewhere?