Research note

We added China’s drug trial registry to TrialForge. Here’s what you’d be missing with CT.gov alone.

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 40 percent of the drug trials running in China.

We loaded China’s regulatory trial registry, the CDE platform¹, and matched it against ClinicalTrials.gov. Three of every four CDE trials is not in ClinicalTrials.gov.

The gap, in one picture

• The CDE platform holds 35,186 drug trials.
• Matched to ClinicalTrials.gov by protocol number, only about a quarter (9,297) are also there.
• The other 25,889 trials exist only in the Chinese registry.

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

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

• China has required 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

Sources: CDE registry; TrialForge database.

A 63 percent bigger picture of China

ClinicalTrials.gov lists about 40,852 interventional trials with a site in China. CDE brings in 25,889 more, a 63 percent step change, and thousands are on molecules a ClinicalTrials.gov based tool would not surface at all.

Interventional studies with sites in China

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

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 3,955 novel drug pipeline assets, genuinely novel, deduplicated, and CDE only, plus about 326 traditional Chinese medicine products counted separately. That is a roughly 16 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 3,955 is a careful floor. For M&A and asset scouting, these are programs a ClinicalTrials.gov based view simply cannot show.

Drug assets: ClinicalTrials.gov and CDE

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

Path forward: TrialForge is loading additional trial registries, including China’s academic registry ChiCTR, the WHO ICTRP, the EU CTIS, and Japan’s jRCT, for a scheduled go-live in fall 2026.

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.