China: the new destination for medical tourism – innovative, life-saving treatments at half the price

In 2018, doctors had given Stuart Lye, a 58-year-old New Zealander, three months to live due to myeloma. Years of chemotherapy, stem cell transplants and new drugs had prolonged his survival without halting the disease, but treatment options in New Zealand had been exhausted. CAR-T immunotherapies were not commercially available in the country, and ongoing trials did not cover his type of cancer: treatment would have cost over 350,000 Australian dollars (more than 200,000 euros). Another New Zealand patient, who had been treated in China, put Lye in touch with a hospital in Shanghai, and in 2025 he and his wife decided to go: seven weeks in the clinic brought the cancer under control, at a total cost of around 65,000 dollars.

Lye’s story is not an isolated case; it is making headlines around the world at the moment and is emblematic of a wider transformation affecting the entire global healthcare system. For decades, medical tourism has followed well-defined routes with low clinical risk: dental treatment in Croatia or Hungary, cosmetic surgery and fertility treatments in Thailand, South Korea or Malaysia. China is carving out a different niche in this landscape, catering to cancer patients who often have no treatment options in their own country and who travel for life-saving treatments that are inaccessible or still experimental elsewhere. The driver is twofold: on the one hand, the costs, which can be as low as a tenth of those in the United States or Australia; on the other, the immediate availability of therapies that elsewhere remain confined to clinical trials with stricter and therefore more limited access criteria.

In the United States, a single CAR-T infusion (using the patient’s own immune cells engineered in the laboratory to recognise and attack specific cancer cells) can cost between $300,000 and $475,000, according to data from the American Cancer Society. In China, the same treatment is priced between $150,000 and $180,000, and could fall further: the country’s regulatory authority has recently approved a marketing application for a therapy priced at less than 300,000 yuan, approximately $44,000. The number of CAR-T therapies approved in China has already reached seven, on a par with the United States, where the technique was originally developed, and the People’s Republic now leads the world in the number of clinical trials dedicated to this type of therapy.

The gap in price and availability reflects a broader trend within the healthcare landscape. By 2024, China had caught up with the United States in terms of the number of experimental drugs entering clinical trials, yet it completed these trials at a rate two to five times faster than the United States and the European Union. However, many of these technologies are too advanced for the financial capabilities of the national healthcare system and local patients, who often lack insurance cover for treatments of this kind. The result is a therapeutic capacity that the country’s international hospitals are beginning to offer to patients from abroad: SinoUnited Health, a healthcare facility in Shanghai, has already treated at least thirty foreign patients with CAR-T therapies since it treated its first case at the end of 2024.

The global medical tourism market is currently estimated to be worth around $34 billion, with growth projected to reach $126 billion by 2035. The Chinese segment, according to estimates, will grow from $1.3 billion to $3.4 billion over the same period, a growth rate proportionally higher than the global average, reflecting precisely this focus on therapies of high clinical value. The trend is not limited to CAR-T: China was the first to carry out a series of cutting-edge procedures for serious conditions. In 2024, Chinese doctors used an in-house developed cell therapy to treat children suffering from a chronic autoimmune disease, systemic lupus erythematosus. In 2025, the first cross-species kidney transplant, from animal to human, was performed in Asia. And this year, in March, China became the first country in the world to approve a brain implant for commercial use in people with spinal cord injuries.