Why Americans Flew to China for a Cancer Drug the FDA Had Approved

The tip came almost as a throwaway line. A doctor looking at Debbie Doppelt's case told her son that it was a shame she wasn't Chinese, because then she could simply walk into a pharmacy in China and buy the drug she needed.

Max Doppelt took that literally. A few months later he was on a plane home from Shanghai with 26 boxes of a lung cancer medicine called sunvozertinib packed in his luggage. They cost him about $10,000.

That trip, first reported by KFF Health News and The Washington Post on October 20, is the story behind a post now circulating on X claiming that Americans are flying to China to buy cancer medication. The trip happened. But the reason for it, and where things stand now, are more interesting than the post lets on.

A mother out of options

Debbie Doppelt is a 60-year-old New York jeweler who has never smoked. A small cough that wouldn't go away led to a lung cancer diagnosis in late 2023. Her tumors carry a mutation called an EGFR exon 20 insertion, an unusual form of the disease that mostly turns up in non-smokers.

Chemotherapy, immunotherapy and surgery held it back for a while. Then, in December 2024, scans found ten tiny tumors in her brain.

The options in Manhattan, home to some of the best cancer hospitals in the country, ran out quickly. An approved drug called amivantamab targets her mutation, but Max worried about its side effects, and several doctors told him it might not reach tumors in the brain. She tried to join a trial of another drug at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and in January 2025 was ruled ineligible because of slight scarring on her lungs. Sunvozertinib was being tested in the United States too, but in trials where half the patients got chemotherapy alone. Her cancer had already beaten chemo.

Sunvozertinib, made by Shanghai-based Dizal Pharmaceutical, had been approved in China in 2023. Within hours of that doctor's remark, the family had found a small supply through a contact in China. Max later flew to Shanghai himself for a refill.

Approved, but not for sale

Here is the part the viral post skips. This was not a cheap foreign knockoff, and it was not about price. The FDA granted sunvozertinib accelerated approval on July 2, 2025, for adults with advanced lung cancer carrying the exon 20 mutation whose disease had progressed after platinum chemotherapy. In the trial behind that approval, tumors shrank in 46% of patients, and those responses lasted a median of 11.1 months.

Yet for more than a year after that, American patients could not get it from a pharmacy. KFF reported that the drug still wasn't on the US market as of mid-October 2026. Neither company has publicly spelled out why the launch took so long. The drug's path to American patients only firmed up when AstraZeneca bought the worldwide rights, in a deal that closed on September 1, 2026, with $600 million paid up front and up to $900 million more tied to milestones.

Max told the South China Morning Post that the US-China trade war added to his fear. He read about tariffs and export controls every day and wondered whether, six months on, there would still be any route to get the medicine to his mother.

That gap closed on October 22, 2026, when AstraZeneca announced that the drug, sold as Zegfrovy, was available in the US through a network of specialty pharmacies. Two days after the story of the 26 boxes broke, the reason for the trips largely went away.

How many Americans actually went

The post makes it sound like a stream of travelers. The only figure comes from Max himself, who told KFF he knows of at least 30 Americans who made the trip for this drug. Nobody has independently counted them, and he was clear that nobody was steering people there. Word simply got around.

Max has since quit his tech job and started a company that uses AI to match cancer patients with clinical trials. About 300 people have used it so far, free of charge. In his experience the drug helps roughly half the patients who take it, and it doesn't always last. One 70-year-old woman he helped bought a six-month supply in China, only to find after three months that her cancer had spread anyway.

Is it legal to bring cancer drugs home?

Mostly no, with an important exception. The FDA's general position is that importing drugs not approved in the US, even for your own use, breaks federal law. But the agency has long used discretion for patients with serious illnesses who have no effective treatment at home, and an HHS spokesperson told KFF it is "sometimes legal" to obtain medication abroad for personal use, while warning about safety and quality risks outside the US system.

Where Debbie Doppelt is now

The drug has worked for her. About 19 months after she started it, her cancer was still mostly held back, with help from a few rounds of radiation and some dose changes. She has barely missed a day of work, and she describes the stretch since her diagnosis as an amazing three years, in some ways better than the three before it.

Max is not under any illusions, though. He told KFF that a spreading cancer will eventually learn to get around the drug, and that when it does, the family will need whatever the newest therapy is. He is already scrolling trial listings for the next one, including a drug China approved in 2021 that is now being tested in the US.

If that next treatment turns up in China first, he has said he will go back. With China accounting for as much as 46% of the new drugs tested worldwide in 2025, according to KFF, he may not be the last American to make that trip.

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