On February 6, Tasly issued an announcement stating that the company had terminated its cooperation with US-based Arbor Pharmaceuticals and regained the exclusive US marketing and distribution rights for Compound Danshen Dripping Pills. This marks a potential setback for more than 20 years of efforts by Chinese patent medicines to break into the mainstream US pharmaceutical market.

Compound Danshen Dripping Pills, developed by Tasly, is one of the earliest Chinese patent medicines seeking to enter the US market through formal drug registration. It first filed for FDA clinical trials in 1997, a process that has now stretched nearly 30 years — far longer than the typical approval cycle for a new drug. Following the termination of the partnership, the prospects for the product’s eventual US launch have become even more uncertain. Under the agreement, Tasly will receive a total payment of $7.5 million.
Tasly told Jianshiju, a leading Chinese pharmaceutical news platform, that the cooperation was ended due to reasons on the partner’s side, and that the project is now being independently advanced by Tasly. No clear timeline has been set for the US launch. In its public announcement, the company noted that the termination will not have a material impact on project progress, production and operations, or its financial condition.
Compound Danshen Dripping Pills is a widely used medication for coronary heart disease in China. According to data from MENET, in the first three quarters of 2025, the product achieved sales of over 2.4 billion yuan, leading the single-ingredient Chinese patent medicine market in China’s public medical institutions. Tasly has not abandoned its ambition to enter the US market, yet how the story will unfold remains to be seen.

01 Thirty Years of Pushing for FDA Approval, Yet to Succeed
As early as 1996, Tasly — only two years after its founding — responded to the national call to “open the door to the FDA” and embarked on a decades-long quest to modernize and globalize traditional Chinese medicine with Compound Danshen Dripping Pills.
The beginning seemed full of promise. In 1997, the U.S. FDA issued a written response to the IND application for Compound Danshen Dripping Pills, stating that the product had passed the investigational new drug application and could proceed directly to Phase II and Phase III clinical trials. This marked a milestone in the overseas expansion of China’s traditional Chinese medicine. Yet after that, the clinical trials in the United States became like an invisible, intangible chain that has bound Tasly ever since.
In June 2006, Tasly announced positive news that Compound Danshen Dripping Pills would enter Phase II clinical trials in the U.S., and Tasly’s share price rose against a weak overall market. The experience may have led Tasly to find a “pattern”: from then on, the company widely publicized every new clinical trial progress of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills overseas. It did so when Phase II trials were completed in 2010 and when Phase III trials were announced finished in 2016. Driven by such positive updates, the company’s market value repeatedly hit new highs.
At its peak, Tasly’s market value surpassed 50 billion yuan, making it the top traditional Chinese medicine stock. Of course, this was not solely thanks to the FDA push: Compound Danshen Dripping Pills also enjoyed strong domestic sales. As early as 2002, it became the first Chinese patent medicine in China to exceed 1 billion yuan in annual sales.However, after announcing the completion of Phase III trials and awaiting the final report, the company’s announcements regarding the U.S. launch fell into a long silence. Meanwhile, as capital attention grew, suspicions emerged that Tasly was using the U.S. FDA application of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills to raise capital improperly and prop up its share price domestically.
In 2016, Zhu Guoguang, a long-time former technical consultant to Tasly, published a sharp criticism, accusing the company of falsifying U.S. clinical trial data for Compound Danshen Dripping Pills and questioning that the actual product under U.S. application was “Dantongke Capsules”. Tasly responded that Zhu’s allegations were “seriously untrue”. In 2017, Li zLianda, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, questioned that the overseas Phase III clinical trial of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills had already failed.
Despite continuous controversies, Tasly has not abandoned its push for FDA approval of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills over the years. In its 2025 interim report, Tasly disclosed that the international clinical research of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills was still in Phase III, with an expected completion date of December 2027.

02 Flagship Product Hits Growth Ceiling
Year after year of announcements stating “clinical trials in progress” have dragged on for nearly 30 years, and capital market enthusiasm has long dried up. An overseas expansion story whose symbolic value outweighed its actual progress could hardly sustain the company’s valuation forever. Today, Tasly’s market value hovers around 22 billion yuan, roughly halved from its peak.
After the flow of updates on its international clinical trials dried up, Tasly’s domestic performance also lost its former momentum. After peaking at 147 million boxes sold in 2017, Compound Danshen Dripping Pills saw several years of continuous decline. Although sales gradually rebounded and reached 153 million boxes in 2024, returning to peak levels, the underlying growth logic has changed completely.
Following the expansion of centralized bulk procurement, the price of Compound Danshen Dripping Pills dropped to 22.18 yuan. Even with sales volume recovering, the “trading price for volume” model means revenue can no longer return to its previous highs. As the company’s most important cash cow, its growth ceiling has become clearly visible.
Tasly sought transformation early on to expand its portfolio of innovative products, and the company has invested heavily in R&D in recent years. In 2024, its R&D investment reached 830 million yuan, ranking among the top of traditional Chinese medicine enterprises. Its R&D layout is also ambitious, focusing on three core areas: cardiovascular, neurology and digestion. In its 2025 interim report, the company listed 83 pipeline projects, including 31 innovative drugs, with a presence in high-profile sectors such as bispecific antibodies, CAR-T and ADCs.
However, years of heavy investment have yet to translate into commercialized products, and the company still relies on Puyouke, an older product approved in 2011. Its highly anticipated future pipeline — whether NR-20201, the world’s first mesenchymal stromal cell drug, or cutting-edge programs including PD-L1/VEGF bispecific antibodies and dual-target CAR-T — remains in the early clinical stages. The path from lab to market approval is still long and fraught with considerable uncertainty.
This broad, scattergun approach to R&D has failed to resolve Tasly’s dilemma of a lack of successor products. This is reflected in its financial reports. In its first earnings release since joining China Resources Sanjiu, Tasly posted 2025 revenue of 8.236 billion yuan, down 3.08% year-on-year; net profit attributable to the parent company excluding non-recurring gains and losses was 787 million yuan, down 24.06% year-on-year.
Although the backing of China Resources Sanjiu has brought resources and channel advantages, Tasly must still solve its most fundamental problem on its own: building out a layered product portfolio.