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Brian Wallach is forty five years old, a husband and a father of two. For much of his life, he worked as a lawyer and political organizer, even serving as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. But eight years ago he received a devastating diagnosis.
I was diagnosed with ALS in twenty seventeen at the age of thirty seven.
My wife, Sandra, and I.
Had just brought our second daughter home when we received the news.
ALS, known widely as lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurodegenerative disorder where motor neurons are gradually lost, leading patients to slowly lose control of their bodies.
For me, this has meant a gradual loss of my ability to walk, use my hands, and speak.
At the time, Brian was given six months to live.
I couldn't accept that timeline.
Instead, I chose to fight with everything I had to change it.
Eight years later, I'm still here.
Today. Brian and his wife Sandra are advocates for the more than thirty thousand Americans living with ALS. They founded the nonprofit I Am ALS in part to advocate for research funding for cure, and some of the most exciting als research to date is coming out of China.
China is trying to have the companies do something that nobody in the world has ever done. That is China's goal, like to be a global bow tech leader.
That's Bloomberg's Asia Health reporter Carolyn Khan Jesus. China is taking a controversial approach to finding cures to diseases like als.
China sees gene editing in animals as one of the key aspects of bow tech development.
Gene editing. The US and Europe take a strict approach to gene editing animals, in particular large animals like pigs, monkeys, and dogs, but as China's biotech industry grows, its use of gene edited large animals has expanded.
So for years, this professor that Eachang at Siwa University was studying to find a solution to als, and his lab was making als animal models. First, they were putting the disease into mice, but mice didn't show any symptoms. It never worked down mice, but then he gene edited a pig. The pig developed symptoms of ALS and then
died about a year later. This was significant because Professor that Eichan was able to replicate a human disease into a big animal, which allows drug developers and scientists to test the full side effects.
By comparing the pig's reaction to that of mice models, John discovered a clue a gene acting uniquely in the mice that led to the development of a new drug he says could help ninety percent of als patients. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the therapy, named snuggo I, for human trials this year. China is betting that drugs like these could help its biotech industry move from creating mostly generic drugs to the far more lucrative
business of making patented medications. But the practice of using large gene edited animals in the drug development process is raising ethical questions. Carolyn says Professor Jah himself was conflicted.
He was definitely happy because for all the years work, you see something that's becoming successful. But he also mentioned he was sorry film the creature to develop that. But again back to this argument, like what is right, what is wrong? How much can you do this? Where should we draw the line right?
This is the big take. Asia from Bloomberg news I'm Wanha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show, we find out how far China has come and how far it's willing to go to become the world's biotechnology superpower, and whether it could really challenge the West. China has
big ambitions in the biotechnology industry. Over the past ten years, it's ramped up spending and drug development, and it's made changes to much of its regulatory regime to mirror Europe. In the US, China's biotech firms have gotten lots of financial help from the government and the explicit support of Chinese present Shijinping. In twenty sixteen, she said the country should become a global scientific and technology power, and he declared biotech and gene editing as strategic priority.
Cdmps do yet.
Bloomberg's Carolyn Kahn says until recently, China's biotech industry was known for making generic drugs. Today, though it's focused on innovation and creating new proprietary medications.
Because generic drugs, just to putay simple, it doesn't make money.
China used to be a distant third to the US and Europe when it came to creating new drugs, but last year it came up with more than twelve hundred new formulations, meeting out Europe and closing in on the US. In twenty fifteen, China was home to just five of the world's top fifty innovative drug companies.
Today, twenty of the fifty companies that are generating the highest number of innovative drugs and now from China.
China's move to dominate global biotech was formally revealed in twenty sixteen in the country's five year Plan. The plan opened the door for China to begin using what has become one of the most effective tools, biobreeding, or genetic editing. Andy Greenfield is a geneticist and reproductive biologist at the
University of Oxford. Scientists have been working on this technology since the nineteen seventies, but Andy says they've only recently learned how to actually edit an animal's genetic code.
The most common way to do that these days would be to use Crispacas nine, which is a gene editing tool that we've had now for over ten years.
Andy says gene editing an animal is complicated enough, but using that animal to cure a disease is more complicated. Still is not always clear which genes need to be targeted to replicate the disease. Figuring that out is expensive and time consuming.
So for example, DNA, it might be you want to specifically model what happens when you change one aminum acid in a sheep or a goat or a mouse, and that could be chicky because it means that other things could happen in the process of trying to edit that gene, which are undesirable and unwanted.
When gene editing technology first started being used, scientists worked almost exclusively on gene editing in mice, but over time they began editing the genomes of larger animals. Andy says large animal models are most helpful to scientists when rodents aren't big enough or won't live long enough to be able to mimic a disease.
When it comes to neurological disorders, to model human neurological disorder once requires having a brain which is at least comparable to the human brain, perhaps which develops a condition over time which isn't always possible when a road model where the average mouse only lists for six months.
Drugs that treat neurological diseases are prized in the drug development world because they're so difficult to make. China has several under development, including snug O one.
There are definitely a lot of innovative drug in the pipelines, but the drug development takes, if not decase, at least it is and in that process you constantly need money to pull into the pipeline.
To support making these drugs and its broader biotech ambitions. China has built eight animal research centers since twenty ten, and it keeps tens of thousands of animals in these facilities. Scientists can apply to them to get a certain type of monkey or a certain type of pig for their research.
So the centers, you go to their website, they proudly exhibit what they have this animal, this monkey, whatever gene is altered with whatever foundation. There are also the biotech companies now trying to gene added the dogs.
As if gene editing wasn't controversial enough, China is also pushing into an even more sensitive area of biological research, cloning.
Actually, China clone the world's first dog with a certain gene edited disease, and also it cloned the world's first monkey with a certain gen edited disease.
Chinese scientists first edited the genes of monkeys that had sleep disorders, anxiety, and depression. They then clone the animals to create a larger pool of patients with the same ailments, all with the idea of accelerating drug development.
In the top universities of the research institutes, there are scientists doing monkeys, for example, to develop them into having autism.
And Carolyn says the companies involved in gene editing and cloning don't just run experiments on the animals, they also sell them. Last year, the global market for genetically modified animals in biomedical research was estimated at fifteen billion dollars, more than twice what it was less than a decade ago, and China has become one of the biggest suppliers of lab animals in the world.
It has probably the world's biggest population of monkeys that is commonly used in developing drugs and vaccines.
Editing the genes of larger animals like monkeys or the pig that Jaii Chang used to treat als is still controversial in the West.
We reach out to the Chinese government for commons. We sent a request three times, but we didn't get any answer from them. We ask how to regulate the industry, especially when there's so much demand on, you know, this kind of research, but the animal welfare law is not there yet in place.
While the US does allow the use of large animal models, the majority of the twenty million lab animals used in the States are mice. Animal welfare is a major factor, and while Carolyn says it's also a concern for Chinese scientists, it tends to be weighed differently.
I think a lot of scientists believe that what China is doing now, even the kind of work that is limited to the lapse to the university, to the research institutes, while in the future, contribute to China's advancement in the ribberry with the US, with Europe, because China is doing something that is very hard to be down right now. In the West.
Coming up, we look at how reliable animal experiments are for developing therapies, the alternatives, and what the future could hold. Gene editing is a big, fast growing business in the agricultural sector. Scientists have found ways to develop cows without horns and salmon that grow faster to adulthood. Gene editing is also growing more popular in the area of science and drug research too, although exact numbers are hard to pin down, but Bloomberg's Carolyn Kahn says one thing is apparent.
Genetically engineered animals are increasingly in demand.
It is an increasingly important strategy to have good animals, larger animals, animals that can better mimic human disease.
And if you want to work on these kinds of animals, China is the place to go. Carolyn says that's because there's not much oversight in the country's labs, and the main focus is on disease control, not animal welfare.
If we're talking about how the animals are treated, I think nobody knows. It's like behind the door, behind the gate. They need to have the environment that is joy and clean and keep them way from bacterial or bogs. So that's a basic standard.
Carolyn says. The only real rule China has is not to mistreat the animals.
There's actually just one sentence in the regulation which says people who are dealing with the animals in the lab should not pease or mistreat them. So that's it about animal suffering. Animal rights or animal welfare is still something that is considered to be Western ideology.
There isn't a unified animal rights charter, but there are principles developed in the nineteen fifties that most scientists follow of.
Three hours which apply to the use of animals in research. So the three hours reduce, replace, and refine. So we're meant to be reducing the number of animals that we use in research ultimately with a view to replacing the use of animals in research by other methods. And when we do have to experiment on animals, we have to ensure we continually refine our experientation so that it causes
the least a suffering to the animal. Now, when we say can we replace the use of animals, that would mean that there's an alternative, for example, an alternative methodology or alternative experiment that would still yield the same scientific information.
And while China is doubling down on using animals more for research, in the West, governments are trying to push scientists in the opposite direction. In April, the FDA released a roadmap to reduce animal testing by pointing to alternatives like lab drawn human organs and artificial intelligence models, and the National Institute of Health points out that the use of animals to model human diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer has had only inconclusive results.
So, for example, today it might be possible to use human organoids, little mini organs that can be grown in a dish using stem cells, So it's possible to use many kidneys and mini brains, etc. And that may be an alternative, always be an alternative, but it may be an alternative to using an animal.
Andy Greenfield says, despite advances like the als drug developed from a pig in China, it's still not clear how useful gene edited animals are when it comes to finding cures for disease.
You might expect there to be more progressing those countries which permit those kind of diseases, but nothing is necessarily the case, because some of those models that they generate may end up being dead ends, they may end up not being particularly good models, so it is known. I don't think there's any necessity here, but I suspect perhaps the probability goes up that they will at some point find a model which is very very useful for understanding
the human condition. Research is just unpredictable. It doesn't go in a simple linear fashion.
A review article by JOHNS Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that fewer than ten percent of animal experiments resulted in therapies used by patients. Meanwhile, public sentiment in the world west is turning against animal testing. In the US and Europe, activists have shut down labs and forced airlines to halt shipments of primates. They've also staged protests outside dog breeding facilities that lasted years.
I think it's important in any country policy makers have an understanding of popular attitudes. Though the attitudes that the public will have I'm sure will be complex. It will be well, yes, but only with the following conditions. In the UK, for example, we are allegedly at a nation of animal lovers, so we claim, but it depends on the context. If I look out my window, I will see people walking their dogs every day, so there is
that sense of love of animals in this country. But we still eat factory farm chickens in this country, where there's been untold descriptions of potential harms to those chickens during their relatively short lives.
Carolin says, in China, the public sees animal testing in a positive light in large parts thanks to the state media in China.
I think, especially state media, when they report on those topics, it's always like a celebration. It feels like this is a technology advancement. Right, China is catching up or even bit better in this field, So it's always like people celebrating this great thing. Rarely anyone doubts or even read the question of the ethical issues of animal testing gene modification, especially large animal.
But China has come across a red line. In twenty nineteen, one scientist had Jankoi carried out experiments on human embryos to give them protection against HIV.
So that was a scandal that he can shake not only China but global scientific community.
He was jailed for three years and the government cracked down. Now, experimentation on humans is strictly regulated, but when it comes to animals, pretty much anything goes. Professor John the man who developed the als therapy from a gene edited pig, told Carolyn that he has no qualms about using animals to find cures for humans.
He feels so happy that China stew Is in the direction like to support animal research because he believed animal models is not going to be replaced in the near future.
Carolyn says, the way Chinese scientists see it, animal testing is a necessary part of the process, a way to potentially prevent humans from suffering.
For human patients, there are so many patients quietly dying and no solutions, especially those rare disease. There's no investment because not so many people need the drugs right, So that's the rare disease patients. They are really struggling to get in enough attention to get enough for help, and they are really frustrated. They are in a kind of sitution that those scientists think maybe we should have more femassy too than a mouse.
This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm wanha. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Offer. If you liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.