The increased focus of Chinese companies on innovative drugs led to the approval of 30 medicines discovered in China in 2023, accounting for 37% of new drugs approved in China overall. Here, with the aim of illuminating the evolution in pharmaceutical R&D in China in recent years, we overview the current pipeline of domestic innovative drug candidates and compare it with our previous analysis from 2021 (Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 21, 553–554; 2022). For details of the dataset and analysis, see Supplementary Box 1.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Pharmcube team for their contribution to the work. This work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (72374119) and Beijing Nova Program.

H.H. is an employee at Pharmcube. The other authors declare no competing interests.