The clearest sign of China’s drug-development surge is not a molecule but a monkey. The price of a research primate there has climbed toward 150,000 yuan, roughly $26,000, and it keeps rising.
That is a steep jump in a short time. The figure is up from an average of about 103,000 yuan in 2025, though still below the extraordinary highs of the pandemic years, when prices briefly ran past 200,000 yuan.
The cause is a boom in demand. Chinese biotech has enjoyed a record run of dealmaking, public listings and venture funding, and all that money has pushed a wave of new drug candidates into the stage of testing that requires animals.
Primates are central to that stage. Before a treatment reaches humans, regulators typically demand safety data from monkeys, whose biology is close enough to ours to reveal problems earlier species cannot.
The trouble is that supply cannot move at the speed of capital. Cynomolgus monkeys, the workhorse of drug testing, take around four years to reach a usable age, so a sudden surge in demand cannot be met for years.
