China's pharma has a 'monkey problem' as tough as 'negotiating with Nvidia'

In June, a Chinese state laboratory paid 178,000 yuan—about $26,294—for each of 40 cynomolgus macaques. Twelve months earlier, the same animal would have cost roughly half that. Similar spikes have rippled through the industry, according to biotech executives, and the timing could hardly be worse for a country that has spent the past five years rebuilding itself into the world's fastest drug development machine.The bottleneck is not a collapse in supply. Regulated breeding farms are holding steady. What has changed is demand, and the scale of it. China now accounts for roughly a third of the global innovative drug pipeline and is the top destination for clinical trials, and every one of those programmes needs primate safety data before it goes anywhere near a human arm. Jielun Zhu, co-founder and CFO at cancer therapy developer Excalipoint Therapeutics, compared the scramble to a large language model company chasing compute.