In 2003, China granted the world’s first regulatory approval of a gene therapy product, Gendicine (Shenzhen SiBiono GenTech), which delivered the p53 gene as a therapy for squamous cell head and neck cancer.

The first clinical trial of gene therapy in China was in 1991—just 1 year after W. French Anderson and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health performed the first approved gene therapy procedure on a four-year-old girl born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) .