Peter Loftus

And so one example is

Thank you so much for having me.

Basically, by using this sort of dual approach, researchers think that they can deliver chemotherapy-type drugs to cancer patients, but in a more targeted way, so that it gets more at the tumor, causing less collateral damage like we've all heard about with chemo.

Well, it has a few implications.

If you're a big company, like the names that we've heard of, like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, you know, the way those companies have operated for a number of years now is that they have their own in-house research labs and they spend a lot of money and do a lot of science trying to find new drugs for diseases that have been tough to treat with drugs in the past.

But they've all shifted to kind of also look beyond their own labs.

Because in the last 20 or more years, there have been a lot of biotech companies, small companies, which have primarily been in the U.S.

that are really doing cutting edge drug research.

And what often happens is a small company will do really good work and come up with a really good drug.

But it's a small company, and so it doesn't have the capacity to really do the big trials or get that drug commercialized.

And so they either get sold to a big pharma company or they license the rights.

And then that drug basically becomes the next big product for a company like Eli Lilly or Merck or Pfizer.

So for many years, the main base of operations for those biotech companies that were selling

funneling their pipeline to big pharma was in the US.

But now what we're seeing is there's a lot more of those in China.

And so the implications for the big companies is it's like another whole source of this cutting edge innovation where they can fill their own pipelines with these externally discovered drugs.

And for the moment, at least at costs that are less than when they do similar deals with US companies.

One is just the pure competitive threat, a sense of policymakers not wanting the U.S.

biotech ecosystem, which has long been the strongest in the world, not wanting to lose that position.

There are concerns about national security just because there have been issues in the past where there have been data integrity issues with Chinese companies doing clinical trials.