Peptide APIs are substances formed by the dehydration and condensation of 10 to 100 amino acids, and are widely used in metabolic diseases, tumors, immune regulation and other fields due to their advantages of small side effects and strong specificity, and have entered a golden development period of both scale and quality since 2024.
1. Market size: explosive growth, significant differentiation of sub-categories
China's peptide API market is growing rapidly, with the market size climbing from 2 billion yuan to 23.4 billion yuan from 2015 to 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 30.8%. In 2024, metabolic peptide APIs will account for 40% of the main force, and the market size of semaglutide and liraglutide APIs under GLP-1 alone will reach 3 billion yuan and 1.5 billion yuan respectively; tumor peptide APIs accounted for 25%, and octreotide, leuprolide and other products supported a total market of 5.85 billion yuan; Immunomodulation accounts for 15%, and the new API of thymus has become the core product of the track with a scale of 2 billion yuan. In terms of price, the price difference of high-end categories is obvious, with the average price of semaglutide APIs being about 10,000 yuan/kg and octreotide being about 9,000 yuan/kg. The market size is expected to exceed 30 billion yuan in 2025 and more than 80 billion yuan in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 20%-25% from 2025 to 2030.
2. Competitive landscape: The head focuses on the high value-added track, and small and medium-sized enterprises share the long-tail market
The market presents a pattern of "concentrated heads, small and medium-sized fragmented". Leading companies such as Nuotai Biologics and WuXi AppTec focus on high value-added peptides such as GLP-1 and oncology, and seize core markets with technical barriers, such as Nuotai Biologics has achieved a significant increase in sales of peptide APIs by taking advantage of the explosion of demand for GLP-1 drugs. At the same time, Jiuzhou Pharmaceutical, Boteng Co., Ltd. and other companies have bound multinational pharmaceutical companies through the layout of the CDMO model to undertake orders for customized peptide APIs. Small and medium-sized enterprises are mostly concentrated in the field of conventional peptides with low technical thresholds, such as thymus faxin and other immunomodulatory products, with price as the main means of competition, and the competition is more fierce. In addition, enterprises have increased international certifications to open up high-end markets in Europe and the United States through certifications such as US DMF and EU CEP, further widening the competitive gap.
3. Technical bottlenecks and breakthrough directions
At present, the core pain points of the industry are focused on production efficiency and cost control. Although traditional chemical solid-phase synthesis methods are widely used, they have problems such as cumbersome steps and many by-products. Leading enterprises are breaking the situation through technological innovation: on the one hand, optimizing the solid-phase synthesis process, some enterprises have shortened the production cycle by 30% and reduced the cost by 25%; on the other hand, the layout of new technologies such as continuous flow synthesis and biosynthesis, Boteng has broken through the continuous flow synthesis technology of peptides, greatly improving the purity and production stability of products. In addition, the application of synthetic biology technology in strain modification also provides a new path for the green and low-cost production of peptide APIs.