FORTUNE -- Now it's China's turn to fling lots of cash at trying to come up with cures.
For more than a decade, the U.S. has lavished funding on efforts to transform a wealth of biological breakthroughs in the lab into actual therapies and profits. After spending nearly a trillion dollars in public and private investments since 2000, however, the biotech and pharma industries have produced an average of only about 21 new drugs a year in recent years -- only two-thirds of the output from 1996 to 2004. Drugs now take a dozen years to be tested and approved, and 90% of meds that reach human clinical trial fail.
This meager yield is causing investors to abscond and business models to be questioned, with only one in nine venture dollars in the U.S. last year going to biotech, down from a ratio of nearly one in six in 2009. Revenues are also down, with a handful of large biotechs like Amgen (AMGN) making the lion's share of money while the majority of biotechs struggle to raise funds, especially for early stage projects.
To read the full, original article click on this link: China: The next biotech superpower? - Fortune Features
Author: David Ewing Duncan
