On a chilly winter morning in Beijing, 38-year-old Zhang, who had long struggled with thyroid eye disease, felt a warm glimmer of hope as he received the doctor's prescription.

It gave him access to a novel domestic drug designed to alleviate the bulging eyes and double vision caused by his condition. As the first new treatment for the disease in China in over seven decades, the injection costs Zhang only a fraction of the price of its foreign equivalents, thanks to its inclusion in the updated national reimbursement drug list for 2026.

"I don't have to worry about the treatment cost anymore, and I can see hope for returning to a normal life," he said during an interview in early January at Beijing Tongren Hospital.

In recent years, stories like Zhang's — in which better, novel therapies become accessible to patients, often at more affordable prices — have proliferated alongside a booming domestic biopharmaceutical industry.

This progress has been buoyed by robust drug regulatory reforms, steady growth in capital investment and talent and a growing emphasis on innovation, experts said.

Developing novel drugs is a notoriously lengthy and costly process, with a failure rate of about 90 percent. The process typically takes about 10 years and costs $1 billion on average, according to researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

Novel drugs in China are generally defined as therapeutic products that have never been approved or marketed domestically or overseas. They are further classified into two categories — improved forms of new drugs, as in the case of the thyroid eye disease injection, and innovative drugs that contain new molecular entities.