A 24-Yuan Cancer Drug Now Sells for 1,200 Yuan as China's Generic Pipeline Stalls

A vial of cyclophosphamide used to cost about 24 yuan in China — roughly three dollars for one of the oldest and most widely used chemotherapy drugs in the world, a backbone of treatment for leukaemia and lymphoma. Since April, patients have found it nearly impossible to buy at any price, and on e-commerce platforms where remaining stock changes hands, asking prices have reached 1,200 yuan a vial, fifty times the old benchmark. The surge, reported this week by Yicai's video news desk and trending on Baidu's hot-search board as "24-yuan lifesaving drug soars to 1,200 yuan," has left blood-cancer patients — many of them children — rationing courses of treatment.

The shortage began, counterintuitively, with the original manufacturer. In February, Baxter stopped making its original-brand version, Andesheng, citing technical problems at its production line. That removed the anchor product from a market where supply had been stable for years, and the fallback turned out to be slow. China's generic-drug industry can usually fill such gaps, but cyclophosphamide is a cytotoxic drug that demands dedicated, high-standard production lines, and Yicai's reporting noted the sobering arithmetic: building a new generic line can take around five years. Existing domestic makers have raised output, but only cautiously — firms worry that if Baxter's original drug returns to the market, the capacity they add now will sit idle and the expansion will never pay for itself.

The result is a textbook market failure playing out in oncology wards: demand urgent and inelastic, supply frozen by uncertainty, and a grey market only too happy to arbitrage the gap. A Yicai explainer circulating on Weibo walks through exactly this chain — original drug exits, generics hesitate, resellers pounce — under the pointed headline "why can't the generics step in immediately?"

The case lands in China amid a running national argument about drug affordability. The country's centralized procurement system has driven the price of hundreds of generics to fractions of their former cost, a genuine consumer win that also thinned margins — and, critics argue, made manufacturers quicker to abandon low-profit drugs when anything goes wrong. Cyclophosphamide sat at the extreme end of that trade-off: indispensable clinically, nearly worthless commercially. When Baxter's line went down, no one had a financial reason to race in behind it.

Regulators have faced similar one-drug crises before and typically respond by designating shortage lists and fast-tracking capacity, but the economics are harder to legislate. For now, oncologists are reportedly swapping patients onto costlier alternative regimens where they can, and families are trading tips in patient groups about which hospital pharmacies still hold stock. The open question hanging over the story is not whether China can make this drug — it is why an industry that can produce almost anything at scale cannot keep a 24-yuan lifeline on the shelf.