China’s biotech hub Suzhou wants to become the next Boston. Can it succeed?

Could a city best known for its classical gardens and ancient canals emerge as China’s answer to Boston – the global epicentre of biotechnology innovation?

Five years ago, the eastern city of Suzhou set forth a bold vision: to transform itself into the “Pharma Valley of China” by 2030, benchmarking its ambitions directly against Greater Boston’s world-leading life sciences ecosystem.

The city in Jiangsu province, steeped in history and famous for its ancient water towns and picturesque gardens, hosts the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park – a hub for electronic information, mechanical manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI), nanotechnology and biomedicine.

With 3,800 biopharmaceutical companies already in town, the vision is to attract more top local and international pharmaceutical firms to set up their regional headquarters there by offering each company a subsidy of up to 60 million yuan (US$8.3 million).

By 2030, Suzhou aims to establish itself as a major biopharmaceutical innovation hub, hosting more than 10,000 companies and generating an output value exceeding 1 trillion yuan (US$139 billion).

At the 2020 Suzhou Biomedical Industry Development Conference, the city’s then Communist Party chief Lan Shaomin declared: “We are the first in China to benchmark ourselves against the global biotechnology hub of Boston … aiming to establish biomedicine as a lasting industrial landmark in Suzhou.”

To train drug innovation leaders of the future, Suzhou’s Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) co-founded its Academy of Pharmacy with the Suzhou Industrial Park government in 2020 “to help Suzhou transform into a world-class biopharmaceutical and healthcare capital”.

South China Morning Post