The journey of a family from the United States across the Pacific in search of a Chinese-developed cancer drug has come full circle, highlighting the growing global reach of pharmaceutical innovation from Wuxi, according to Wuxi Daily and KFF Health News.
In January 2025, as Debbie Doppelt, a US patient whose lung cancer had spread to her brain, was seeking treatment, a doctor told her son, Max: "Too bad she's not Chinese. She could go to a pharmacy in China and buy the medicine."
The medicine was sunvozertinib, an innovative lung cancer drug developed by Wuxi-based Dizal Pharma. As it had yet to become commercially available in the US at that time, Max traveled to Shanghai to obtain the drug and bring it back to the US.
On Oct 23, 2026, Dizal announced that sunvozertinib had officially launched in the US. It is the first China-developed first-in-class drug to gain US approval, marking a milestone for Wuxi's pharmaceutical industry.
