A surge in drug research in China has driven the cost of a laboratory monkey to about CNY140,000, a sum that exceeds the country’s average annual wage. Official government procurement records showed that prices had doubled in the last five years for such monkeys, which are widely used in the pre-clinical stage to check whether a drug is safe and how it is absorbed, broken down and cleared by the body. Analysts said the soaring cost was underpinned by a flood of drug-licensing deals between Chinese biotech firms and global pharmaceutical giants, alongside a revival in pharmaceutical fundraising, which had pushed a record number of candidate drugs into early-stage testing. A public tender released in early February by the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica revealed a budget of CNY62 million for 450 cynomolgus macaques, or about CNY137,800 per animal.
The price is slightly below the CNY170,000 that the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control paid for monkeys in its first batch purchase in 2023, when supply was tight owing to a scramble for primates to conduct Covid-19 vaccine and drug trials. But the price still marks a surge from 2021, when the national medical authority spent CNY70,500 per monkey. “U.S. rate cuts have boosted biotech funding, so more projects are moving into early stages and need safety assessment – and that means more monkeys,” said Cui Cui, head of healthcare research for Asia at U.S. investment bank Jefferies.
Candidate antibody-drug conjugates require 70 to 100 monkeys per drug in pre-clinical safety studies, while simpler drugs with lower toxicity risks require around 40 to 60 animals, Cui said. Some small-molecule drugs can use dogs for research instead of monkeys, she added. Chinese drug firms signed a record 157 out-licensing deals worth USD135.7 billion with global pharmaceutical companies last year. At the same time, a growing wave of pre-revenue drug makers has taken advantage of the Chapter 18A regime to list in Hong Kong. Helen Chen, head of L.E.K. Consulting’s China biopharmaceuticals and life sciences practice, said that the ramp-up in clinical trials in China, coupled with Chinese companies preparing and conducting trials overseas, was leading to more investigational new drug (IND) applications – and therefore “more IND-enabling toxicology studies” that relied on primates.
Founder Securities said it expected the annual domestic supply of experimental monkeys to range between 49,000 and 52,400 animals from 2025 to 2027, compared with a likely demand of 51,300 to 62,600 animals a year. “On the supply side, it is difficult to expand capacity in the short term, and some monkey farms say their production has already been fully booked through the first quarter of 2026,” the brokerage said. “The supply-demand imbalance is therefore expected to persist, and prices are likely to rise further in the near term.”
Chinese contract research organizations (CROs), which pharmaceutical firms hire to run pre-clinical and early to mid-stage clinical trials, have taken steps to hedge against volatility caused by the price swings. WuXi AppTec acquired Guangdong Chunsheng, a monkey farm in the southern Chinese province, in 2020, giving it access to more than 20,000 cynomolgus macaques by 2021, according to a Chinese brokerage filing. According to Cui, Wuxi AppTec currently had 30,000 monkeys, the South China Morning Post reports.
