Started in China

摘要

While pharmaceutical companies arou.nd the world are falling over themselves to invest in China, Chinese biotech companies are struggling to be taken seriously internationally. According to Mingwei Wang, director of China's National Center for Drug Screening, the 6,600 companies in existence earlier this decade has shrunk to fewer than 3,000 after a law was implemented in 2004 requiring that drugs be made in accordance with the "good manufacturing practices" that are standard elsewhere. The remaining firms generally make generic versions of patented drugs. Just 3% of the drugs that domestic companies get approved in China each year are 'discovered in China'-and most of these are "new formulations of traditional Chinese medicine", which aren't really new, says Wang.