Research note

TrialForge captures both of China's clinical trial registries, while peers capture only one. Here's what you could be missing.

TrialForge Research, July 2026.

China has become the hottest global market in drug development. Yet if you track it through ClinicalTrials.gov, you are missing nearly two thirds of the biopharma trials running in China.

We loaded both of China's national trial registries, the CDE drug registration platform¹ and the academic registry ChiCTR², and analyzed them against ClinicalTrials.gov. The two Chinese registries capture almost entirely different trials, both from each other and from ClinicalTrials.gov.

ChiCTR is the historical, academic registry and is captured widely by WHO, Clarivate, AdisInsight, and likely most trial databases. However, we show that CDE is the critical biopharma platform, and is not captured by WHO, Clarivate, AdisInsight, and likely most trial databases (see our competitive overview here). TrialForge captures both, making it the leading trial database on biopharma trials in China.

ChiCTR and CDE: near mirror image registries

Line the three registries up and they look like different worlds. ClinicalTrials.gov is global and mixed, a blend of industry and academic trials across every therapeutic area. CDE, the drug registration platform run by China's NMPA, is almost entirely industry and entirely drug, with more than 40 percent bioequivalence studies for generics. ChiCTR, the academic clinical research registry, is the mirror image, almost entirely hospital and academic sponsored, with only about a quarter of its trials involving a drug at all.

That mirror image composition is why the two Chinese registries barely overlap. Fewer than 200 trials appear in both, not thousands. The only trials that could plausibly sit in both are industry sponsored drug trials, and ChiCTR holds only about 230 of those in total.

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov; CDE registry; ChiCTR; TrialForge combined database. Totals are unique trials in the combined database after deduplication. Percentages are shares of each registry's trials.

The takeaway for anyone tracking China is that no single registry captures everything. And, if you are looking at biopharma and novel drug trials, the CDE registry becomes that much more critical for your workstream.

The gap, in one picture

Deduplicated across all three registries, China accounts for more than 204,000 unique trials in the combined TrialForge database. About 26,000 exist only in CDE and 124,000 of them exist only in ChiCTR, never reaching ClinicalTrials.gov.

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov; CDE registry; ChiCTR; TrialForge combined database. Four labeled regions plus the three small overlaps sum to the 204,227 total.

A registry that has grown significantly, with 50 to 75 percent innovative drug candidates

• China has required biopharma drug trials to be registered on CDE since the platform opened in 2013. Registrations have grown from less than 500 to more than 5,000 in a year.
• From 2017 onward, a wave of bioequivalence studies arrived, driven by China's 2016 generic consistency evaluation program, which requires generic drugs to prove bioequivalence to the original. The rising generic share is a policy story, not a slowdown in innovation.

CDE trials over time

Source: CDE registry; TrialForge database.

A 196 percent bigger picture of China industry, interventional trials

ClinicalTrials.gov lists about 13,032 industry, interventional trials with a site in China. CDE and ChiCTR bring in 25,526 more, a 196 percent step change that nearly triples the picture, and thousands are on molecules a ClinicalTrials.gov based tool would not surface at all.

Source: CDE registry; ClinicalTrials.gov; ChiCTR; TrialForge combined database. Note: about 750 ct.gov trials do not list a site in China, and most list no country at all, yet appear in CDE with China sites, which shows information lacking in ct.gov. Those trials are counted in CDE and ChiCTR above.

An M&A prize: assets you cannot find anywhere else

The trials are only half the story. Those CDE only new-drug trials run on molecules our ClinicalTrials.gov based asset library does not recognize: roughly 5,250 novel drug pipeline assets, genuinely novel, deduplicated, and CDE only. That is a roughly 19 percent expansion of the tracked drug-asset universe, measured against a ClinicalTrials.gov base held to the same deduplicated standard. Many are domestic-only programs from China's pipeline leaders such as Qilu, Hengrui, Hansoh, CSPC, and Chia Tai Tianqing. Drug-to-asset resolution is still partial, so this is a careful floor. For M&A and asset scouting, these are programs a ClinicalTrials.gov based view simply cannot show.

Source: CDE registry; ClinicalTrials.gov; TrialForge database.

1. CDE is China's Center for Drug Evaluation, the drug review arm of the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA). It runs the national Drug Clinical Trial Registration and Information Disclosure Platform at chinadrugtrials.org.cn, where sponsors must register drug trials conducted in China.

2. ChiCTR is the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, a World Health Organization primary registry for trials conducted in China, run by West China Hospital of Sichuan University and hosted at chictr.org.cn.