The impact of China's own brands

The number of new lung cancer cases every year in China has reached 600,000, half of whom were killed by the disease. However, only 30,000 lung cancer patients are reportedly using molecular targeted medicines.

"Just as President Xi Jinpingsaid during his visit to a medical equipment company in Shanghai this May, many citizens can not afford to use high-end medical equipment. We should speed up the progress of creating domestic medicines to reduce the cost of treatment. We should create our own industry and our own brands," said Ding.

The Betta pharmaceuticals company and the China Pharmaceutical Industry Research and Development Association in November 2011 jointly launched a project to deliver free Conmana to cancer patients. As of October 2014, more than 13,000 patients have been given drugs as part of the project, China Central Television reported.

Although it was hoped that, by breaking the monopoly foreign companies had over molecular targeted therapies, Conmana could lower the cost of this kind of treatment in China, these treatments are still beyond the means of ordinary cancer patients in China. The average monthly income in the country was less than 5,000 yuan in 2013, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Conmana has been included in the health care system in nine cities of Zhejiang and Shandong provinces, where patients are required to pay less than 50 percent of the original price of the drug, local media reported.

 Experts have called for more anti-cancer drugs to be made cheaply available via the national health care system. "However, the budget for the healthcare system is limited, so more research and development needs to be carried out before we can add more cancer medicines to the system," said Zhou Zijun, professor with the School of Public Health at Peking University, adding that the price of these medicines would also decrease if the market domination of international pharmaceutical companies was eliminated.

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