Global pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca said on Thursday it would start selling a cancer drug after coming under criticism for failing to bring it to the US market faster, prompting some Americans to fly to Shanghai to procure the potentially life-saving medicine first developed by China.
In recent months, desperate Americans have travelled to China to obtain the Chinese-made cancer drug that was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration but remained unavailable in the country for more than a year, according to a cancer-treatment awareness advocate who made the journey while his mother was battling the disease.
Developed by China’s Dizal Pharmaceutical, sunvozertinib is a targeted lung cancer drug designed to treat adults with an advanced form of the illness, offering another treatment option for patients.
“The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025,” Max Doppelt, chief executive of Patient Data Vault, a consultancy that connects cancer patients to clinical trials, wrote on social media on Wednesday.