Big Western Pharma companies expand drug investment in China

Photo by CGTN

Leading western pharmaceutical companies are changing their decades-long strategy of selling existing drugs to China by investing into Chinese drug market to develop new drugs tailored for local patients.

In a report published on Wednesday, Wall Street Journal said that in recent years, American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, its Swiss rival Novartis and France's Sanofi "began moving from bringing existing drugs to discovering new cures here" in China.

J&J opened a discovery lab in Shanghai in 2012, working on medicines for hepatitis B. While hepatitis C is more common in the US, hepatitis B is endemic in China. Of the 350 million individuals worldwide infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV), one third reside in China.

By targeting China's top killers, liver cancer and stomach cancer, Western pharmaceutical companies now are more relying on China as a discovery center rather than a manufacturing one.

"Like drug production -- Western firms have long contracted Chinese factories to manufacture their drugs inexpensively -- the cost of drug discovery is cheap in China, too," said WSJ, as more and more Western-trained Chinese scientists return to their home country.

With an aging population over 1.3 billion and a swelling middle class, health care industry in China has been attracting huge domestic and international investments. China's domestic market for drugs could grow from 108 billion US dollars in 2015 to around 167 billion by 2020, according to an estimate from the US Department of Commerce.

(Source: Xinhua)