China Sets 2030 Goal for 25% of Global First-in-Class Drugs

China’s newly issued 15th Five-Year Plan for pharmaceutical-industry development sets a goal for China-developed first-in-class medicines to make up at least 25% of the global total by 2030. The plan covers 2026–2030 and was released jointly by multiple central government agencies.

The strategy is intended to shift China further from generic drugs and contract manufacturing toward original, globally competitive biomedical innovation. “First-in-class” generally refers to therapies using a new mechanism of action against a disease.

Other headline targets include average annual growth of at least 20% for the innovative-drug sector; at least five Chinese-origin medicines with more than $1 billion each in annual global sales; and pharmaceutical-industry revenue of at least 3.5 trillion yuan by 2030.

The plan also calls for listed drugmakers to sustain average R&D spending above 10% of revenue, cultivate 50 pharmaceutical companies with annual revenue over 10 billion yuan, establish 20 major pharma industrial parks, and bring more than 200 innovative medical devices to market.

The target is ambitious:
it would mean Chinese companies and research institutions originating roughly one in four of the world’s novel-mechanism medicines by the end of the decade. The plan’s indicators are policy goals rather than guarantees of commercial or regulatory success.