DeepSeek moment, noun
/ˈdiːp. siːk ˈməʊ.mənt/
A moment of sudden recognition of China’s technological prowess, especially when it challenges Western assumptions about innovation.
As the year ends and dictionaries hunt for their word of the year, my nomination is the one above. It comes from DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that stunned the world in January with the performance of its artificial-intelligence model. As China’s rapid innovation shows up in more areas, the phrase is likely to spread. And in the past month, as I spoke to American pharma bosses, it was striking how often they used “a DeepSeek moment” to describe the performance of a Chinese drug candidate that made them rethink the scale of China’s biotech industry.
What struck me as peculiar is that the dynamics of the pharma industry look nothing like the other fields in which China and America are cast as rivals. In AI, electric vehicles and semiconductors, the two sides are framed as competitors. Yet in pharma they are not. Here, executives on both sides speak with open admiration. One big pharma boss in America praised the speed of Chinese biotech companies, calling their teams “machines”. Chinese firms say they have much to learn from Western companies when it comes to running large trials and dealing with regulators. They also admire America’s drug regulator. One Chinese executive called the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the “gold standard” for judging safety and efficacy.
There were also some pointed asides. I heard befuddlement at why the Trump administration seems intent on weakening the FDA with a stream of ad hoc directives. Others noted that stricter visa rules and a chillier climate for Chinese researchers have made it easier for them to recruit top-notch talent.
More curious still is the mutual dependence built into drug development. Chinese biotech companies have become a major source of new medicines for European and American companies, accounting for a third of licensing deals by value this year. Chinese firms, meanwhile, need access to the American market to recoup research costs. China’s own drug market may be the world’s second largest, but it is still only a sixth the size of America’s—and far more cost-sensitive, with state procurement pushing prices down. American drug prices support much of China’s growth in drug development.
That is what makes China’s rise tricky for policymakers. Any attempt to curb cross-border licensing would hurt Chinese biotech companies. It would also deprive Americans of novel medicines and affect the rest of the world, since the American market underwrites much of China’s research. A DeepSeek moment need not signal one side pulling ahead; it can just as well show how much both sides stand to gain when co-operation, not rivalry, drives innovation.
|