U.S. biotechs tighten secrecy to beat Chinese fast-follower drugs

Chinese fast-follower drugs grew 15-fold since 2015, data show

Citing fast-follower drug risk, U.S. biotechs go dark on promising science

More Western biotech companies are keeping their research secret to prevent overseas rivals from replicating their science, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing industry executives and data.

Steve Potts, founder of Breakthru Medicine, told the Journal his company — whose team has shepherded a combined 13 drugs through FDA approval — is taking extreme measures to stay secret. Potts said he won’t pitch venture-capital firms, hasn’t presented at academic conferences, and is taking money only from a handful of trusted, high-net-worth individuals and universities.

“You have to be much more thoughtful with how much you’re talking about what you’re working on,” Potts said.

For decades, young biotechs broadcast their science publicly to attract investment. Today, more are going dark to keep rivals, many based in China, from replicating their research and launching competing clinical trials faster, Potts and other executives said.

The speed and cost gap is central to the shift. Research in China can move twice as fast and cost half as much as within the U.S., according to Norstella, a life-sciences firm. The number of early-stage trials run in China in 2025 was about five times as high as a decade prior, while the number of similar trials run in the U.S. has stagnated, Norstella data shows.

That dynamic has allowed Chinese biotechs to become a bigger threat to the U.S. industry and has caused drugmakers big and small to rethink how much information they share about promising new science, executives said.

“Fast followership is a real concern,” said Priya Singhal, head of development at Biogen. She said that Chinese biotechs have “gotten very good with pretty well-known targets — in bettering them, in really getting more precise.”

Biogen does not share any proprietary information with Chinese partners beyond what Chinese regulators require, Singhal said.

The fast-follower phenomenon

The number of so-called fast-follower drugs from China — treatments that copy innovative Western drugs shortly after their data is published — grew by a factor of 15 from 2015 to 2025, according to Norstella.

After Novo Nordisk published landmark results in February 2021 showing strong results for its weight-loss drug semaglutide, at least 16 Chinese programs targeting the same mechanism filed for clinical-trial approval or dosed patients in China within 18 months, according to biopharma market-intelligence firm Sleuth. At least 62 such Chinese programs have launched through June 2026, Sleuth data shows.

Many ended up back in Western hands: Thirteen programs were licensed back to U.S. and European pharma giants — including to Novo Nordisk, which bought a Chinese version of a drug program built on its own discovery.

A similar cascade hit oncology in late 2023, when Amgen presented data showing it could target a hard-to-treat protein on small-cell lung cancer cells. A Chinese company started laying the groundwork for a competing trial within six weeks, according to Sleuth. At least 10 separate programs entered clinical development in China targeting the same protein within 18 months.

The race has reached genetic medicine, some of the most advanced science in labs today. Cambridge, Mass.-based Beam Therapeutics developed an experimental treatment for a rare inherited disease that damages the lungs and liver, dosing its first patient in 2024. A former Beam employee had already joined Shanghai-based YolTech Therapeutics in 2022, building a rival drug with the exact same target using the same technology, according to the Journal. The former employee said she didn’t work on Beam’s competing drug while at the company.

YolTech’s treatment won U.S. regulatory clearance for a late-stage trial in March — two months after Beam struck its own deal with the FDA to speed its rival drug toward approval. Last month, a San Diego-based biotech company licensed YolTech’s drug.

Funding paradox and legislative response

For smaller U.S. biotechs, the secrecy dynamic creates a paradox. Pitching dozens of investors — the traditional path to funding — spreads proprietary science to exactly the audience that can leak it. Staying secret limits companies to small, private capital pools that are hard to access without connections.

“We used to get by in an imperfect system because the venture world would capitalize a good idea,” said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. But now, she said, investors want to see proof that a drug might work in patients before committing, which is easier to obtain from China where trials move faster.

Large drug company executives said they are considering doing deals for early-stage drugs from China more than ever before, according to the Journal.

Congress is trying to choke off some U.S. investment in Chinese firms. Lawmakers introduced a bill last month to require investments in Chinese drugmakers to be screened by the Treasury Department, which has the potential to stop certain deals from getting done, the Journal reported. Some lawmakers are also seeking to change regulations so the FDA cannot accept clinical-trial data from China altogether.