The number that catches you this morning: Chinese drugmakers filed half as many new drug applications in the first six months of the year as they did over the same stretch in 2025, and they managed it inside a system rebuilt to speed those filings up. No one can say why yet.
The day's other story sits apart from that one but lands in the same place the industry's attention keeps drifting: when Amgen and Sanofi each went looking for new R&D leadership, both reached for executives fluent in AI.
A Quieter First Half
As seems to be the norm in the industry these days, we'll spend some time talking about Chinese biopharma. If you read yesterday's edition, the clear consensus at BIO in San Diego was that dealmakers on the hunt for molecules don't necessarily focus on just one region – they follow the science to wherever it is, and these days, the science is in China.
Streamlined regulatory review has helped supercharge trials there: China's drug regulator, the National Medical Products Administration, rolled out a new 30-day IND review and approval pathway last September, for selected eligible drugs.
So it's a bit of a surprise that this year's first half looks a lot quieter than last year's. The number of accepted or approved investigational new drug applications from Chinese companies globally came in at roughly half of H1 2025's total. The reasons aren't clear.