By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-03-28 22:01:31 | Updated at 2025-03-31 13:57:37
2 days ago
A decade ago, treating cancer with personalised mRNA vaccines seemed like a US$1 million gamble per patient, a therapy reserved for the ultra-rich.
But Chinese biotech start-ups are aiming to change that – by designing cancer therapy for a fraction of the cost and also taking on Western pharmaceutical giants in the process.
Beijing-based Likang Life Sciences is one such biotech company. At the end of February, Likang received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to begin human clinical trials of its mRNA cancer vaccine, the LK101 injection, making it the first Chinese product of its kind to reach this stage.
Chen Li, the company’s founder, said he could not reveal the exact price of the product as it was not yet at the commercial stage, but confirmed that it would be “significantly lower” than its Western counterparts.
Prices for Chinese drugs of this kind could fall “exponentially”, said Cheng Xudong, founder of another Beijing-based biotech company, ZSky, which is also working on personalised cancer vaccines and is moving at a similar pace to Likang in getting its product to market.
Judging by the present cost of production at the clinical research stage, Cheng, who previously worked as a biological researcher at Northwestern University in the United States, estimates that his company’s candidate would cost less than 100,000 yuan (US$13,800) for a six-dose course, including raw materials, consumables and labour.
Neeha Zaidi, a pancreatic cancer specialist at the Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told The New York Times in a 2023 article that “cost is a major barrier for these types of vaccines to be more broadly utilised” – adding that this could potentially create disparities in access.
