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Invention Helps China's Drug Industry Survive: Expert
Drug developers in China hope they can extract powerful components from herbal medicines to produce new drugs for major illnesses.
Chen Kaixian, an academician from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that 97 percent of medicines in China are based on foreign products. The industry will suffer setbacks as more and better foreign products are available on the domestic market.
Although China has more than 6,300 pharmaceutical enterprises, most small and medium-sized ones cannot afford huge investments in research and development.
"China has an abundant resources of herbal medicine and a long history in using them. It is more cost-effective to discover useful components from natural medicines," he told a seminar at the Fourth Beijing Biotech and Pharma Industry Development Forum. China has succeeded in developing some new drugs based on herbs to treat malaria and dementia.
Prof. Chen called for co-operation of specialists in molecular biotechnology, molecular pharmacology, chemistry, structural biology and computer science to obtain some candidate compounds for new drug development.
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