![\"China\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/e963d33f-6c24-41c6-b0b8-c27ed44cfc4d_fc188cd5.jpg\" "\\"China\u2019s")
<\/p>\nGlobal pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca on Thursday said it would start selling a cancer drug after coming under criticism for failing to bring it to the US market faster, prompting some Americans to fly to Shanghai to procure the potentially life-saving medicine first developed by China.<\/p>\n
In recent months, desperate Americans have travelled to China to obtain the Chinese-made cancer drug that was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration but remained unavailable in the country for more than a year, according to a cancer-treatment awareness advocate who made the journey while his mother was battling the disease.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very thankful to all the development that companies in China have done because it saved my mum\u2019s life,\u201d Max Doppelt, chief executive of Patient Data Vault, a consultancy that connects cancer patients to clinical trials, told the South China Morning Post.<\/p>\n
Developed by China\u2019s Dizal Pharmaceutical, sunvozertinib is a targeted lung cancer drug designed to treat adults with an advanced form of the illness, offering another treatment option for patients.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing in China physically, when I was there, I felt a very strong presence of connection between two very foreign, two very different places,\u201d Doppelt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are all human beings, and health transcends it all. There are no political biases or sides when it comes to health.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that he knew of at least 30 other Americans who had made the same trip.<\/p>\n
Doppelt said he decided to travel to Shanghai to obtain the drug after his mother\u2019s lung cancer spread to her brain in January 2025, when she had about 10 tumours.<\/p>\n
At a lung cancer conference, a doctor told him that if his mother \u201chappened to have lived in China, she could just get it\u201d, as the country had approved the drug in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cI became pretty obsessed over it because my first reaction was, well, why don\u2019t we go to China?\u201d<\/p>\n
However, at the time, he grew increasingly concerned about the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing, marked by tit-for-tat tariffs and export controls.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was reading that in the news every day. So my main concern was: in six months, will there still be an avenue and a route for my mum to get this medicine?\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Despite the geopolitical tensions, he flew to China and returned home with 26 boxes of the China-made drug.<\/p>\n
The Washington Post first reported the story on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
AstraZeneca said on Thursday that sunvozertinib would be commercially available in the United States under the brand name Zegfrovy, after securing worldwide rights to develop and sell the drug from China\u2019s Dizal Pharmaceutical.<\/p>\n
While the FDA granted an \u201caccelerated approval\u201d to the drug in July 2025, AstraZeneca announced its \u201cexclusive license agreement\u201d<\/a> with China\u2019s Dizal Pharmaceutical in July of this year.<\/p>\n \u201cAstraZeneca will acquire worldwide rights to develop and commercialise Zegfrovy,\u201d the company said in a press release.<\/p>\n The deal included a US$600 million upfront payment to Dizal, with a further US$900 million potentially payable upon meeting specific regulatory clearances, as well as tiered royalties on global sales<\/a> of Zegfrovy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory clearances,\u201d the statement added.<\/p>\n In an email response to the SCMP, an AstraZeneca spokesperson said the global licensing agreement was \u201ccompleted\u201d only on September 1, 2026, and that the firm \u201chas been working to make Zegfrovy available to patients in the US as quickly as possible\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cBy making Zegfrovy available in the US, we are bringing an oral, mutation-specific treatment option to a distinct patient population with substantial unmet need,\u201d the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n Doppelt said he initially chose not to speak publicly but became \u201cincreasingly frustrated\u201d that the drug remained unavailable in the US despite an FDA approval.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery single quarter, we have been told as a community, of all the lung cancer patients who have this mutation, that it\u2019s going to be ready next quarter. It\u2019s going to be next quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Doppelt said he would not blame the drug maker for the 15-month delay.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout AstraZeneca, we wouldn\u2019t even have the drug today.\u201d<\/p>\n Kyle Concannon, a doctor-scientist at the University of Colorado, said Washington needed to change its approach to developing and adopting<\/a> new treatments.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the US wants to remain competitive and ensure patients don\u2019t have to travel across the world for treatments, we need to both accept greater risk, recognising that for many patients the alternative is no treatment,\u201d he wrote on social media.<\/p>\n Anne Wojcicki, CEO and founder of the 23andMe Research Institute, noted that China had transformed from a country known for producing raw materials into a global force in drug discovery, contrasting its position with that of the US in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n \u201cThe world has flipped. It\u2019s remarkable how China has become a powerhouse in drug discovery and is now leading,\u201d she said on social media.<\/p>\n She added that artificial intelligence<\/a> would bring another shift in the industry, with large-scale data initiatives and \u201cnimble regulatory oversight\u201d key to driving progress.<\/p>\n China has rapidly expanded its pharmaceutical sector<\/a>, taking the lead in clinical trial registrations<\/a> between January 2024 and June 2025 with 24 per cent of the world total, according to World Health Organization data compiled by the British Medical Journal.<\/p>\n China\u2019s share of global early-stage drug-development programmes rose from 8 per cent in 2015 to 32 per cent in 2024, closing the gap with the US, whose share fell from 48 per cent to 37 per cent over the same period, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March 2026.<\/p>\n Doppelt called for FDA reforms, including greater transparency around clinical trials and data reporting, as well as greater openness to testing new cures.<\/p>\n He also pointed to China\u2019s approach to cellular therapy research, saying the US could adopt some of its practices.<\/p>\n \u201cIn China, I think we could learn something from them because there are dozens of cellular therapy trials that are spun up all the time.\u201d — SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Global pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca on Thursday said it would start selling a cancer drug after coming under criticism…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":939210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[22075,64,63,79949,505576,6441,11425,6388,137,23530,490,15216,505575,164504,505577],"class_list":["post-939209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-astrazeneca","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cancer-drug","tag-china-pharmaceutical","tag-clinical-trials","tag-fda-approval","tag-geopolitical-tensions","tag-health","tag-lung-cancer","tag-medication","tag-scmp","tag-sunvozertinib","tag-us-market","tag-zegfrovy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/939210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}