Can China and the U.S. work together to cure cancer?
Illustration by Sam Ward
In the early afternoon of June 5, 2017, at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference, hundreds of the world’s leading cancer researchers, pharmaceutical firms and biotech investors focused their attention on a virtually unknown Chinese firm called Legend Biotech.
At that time, the U.S. company Johnson & Johnson’s $10.6 billion research and development budget amounted to $3 billion more than all Chinese pharmaceutical firms combined. But despite hailing from a biotech backwater, Legend Biotech had secured a marquee slot at the conference to present data on their new drug for multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that develops in bone marrow and kills more than 100,000 people around the world each year. The study’s principal investigator Zhao Wanhong explained that the drug used an exciting new cell therapy technology called CAR-T and that 33 out of 35 multiple myeloma patients in Legend’s trial went into remission within two mont
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