Unlikely rival is slowing China's new race
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Live Events as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Addas a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now! (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel China's pharmaceutical sector, which has spent the past five years rebuilding itself into the world's fastest drug development machine, is now being held back by a shortage of lab monkeys, and biotech executives say securing one now feels as difficult as negotiating with Nvidia for its chips.In June 2026, a Chinese state laboratory paid 178,000 yuan, roughly Rs 22 lakh or $26,294, for each of 40 cynomolgus macaques, according to the Times of India. Twelve months earlier, the same animal cost approximately half that amount. Since 2018, when a single lab monkey cost around $1,800 (roughly Rs 1.5 lakh at current rates), prices have climbed by more than 1,000% in eight years.The bottleneck is not a collapse in supply. Regulated breeding farms are holding steady. What has changed is demand, and the scale of it.China now accounts for roughly a third of the global innovative drug pipeline and is the top destination for clinical trials.
Every one of those programmes requires primate safety data before it can proceed to human trials.Jielun Zhu, co-founder and CFO at cancer therapy developer Excalipoint Therapeutics, compared the scramble to a large language model company chasing computing power. "It's like negotiating with Nvidia to secure its chips," he told the Times of India.UBS Securities' China healthcare research head Chen Chen pointed specifically to biologics and newer drug formats such as antibody-drug conjugates, bispecifics, and in vivo CAR-T therapies, the exact categories where Chinese firms have been signing blockbuster licensing deals with Western pharmaceutical companies, the Times of India reported. A single programme can consume anywhere from a dozen to a hundred animals.Harri Jarvelainen, a China-based consultant who advises Western clients on preclinical work, told the Times of India that study planning now takes an extra four months on average, and in worse cases as long as ten months.That delay matters because speed to clinic has been the single biggest competitive advantage Chinese biotechs have held over their American rivals.
Primates are used in preclinical toxicology studies to track how a drug moves through the body, what it does to organs, and whether it poses fatal risks. There is no regulatory substitute for this data and no workaround.Large contract research organisations that had the foresight to build their own breeding operations are now sitting on significantly more valuable assets.WuXi AppTec, Pharmaron, and Joinn Laboratories all run their own primate breeding programmes. Joinn Laboratories in July forecast a thirteen-fold jump in first-half net profit, largely because the monkeys on its books are now worth far more than they were a year ago, according to the Times of India.There is precedent for price spikes of this kind. During the Covid-19 pandemic, lab monkey prices rose from around $1,800 (roughly Rs 1.5 lakh) in 2018 to approximately $7,000 (around Rs 5.8 lakh) by 2020 as vaccine development programmes drove a sudden surge in demand.The difference this time, Zhu, quoted by the Times of India, is structural.
The BriefWire