What do foreign pharmaceutical companies research and develop in China?

Source: Oriental Morning Post on November 21, 2014, multinational pharmaceutical giants are trying to develop heavy new drugs in Chinese laboratories Janet Hammond, senior vice president of Roche Global Infectious Disease Research and translational medicine, recently told the author that several antiviral drugs, including hepatitis B treatment, will enter the clinical trial stage in the next 12 to 15 months These drugs are synthesized or found in Shanghai laboratory Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, announced that it had invested 136 million Swiss francs (863 million yuan) in China's R & D center to build a new R & D center in Shanghai to increase the research and development of anti infectious diseases drugs, which was set up in 2004 Drug research and development is divided into research and development, the former includes the determination of treatment and target, screening compounds, etc., while the latter is mainly pre clinical and clinical trials (divided into phase I, phase II, phase III), research and development to determine the boundaries of candidate drugs For most foreign enterprises, the role of China's R & D center is relatively clear: foreign new drugs have been listed in China for supporting development, such as clinical trials, application to drug regulatory authorities, etc However, the research is relatively weak Even if there is, it is only a "start" to the headquarters or other R & D centers in the company, and there is less heavy news to be announced However, more and more enterprises are interested in the "research" capability of China's R & D center Amgen, an American biopharmaceutical company, recently launched Amgen Asia R & D center in the campus of Shanghai University of science and technology It claims that the center covers the whole R & D industry chain, and has made a breakthrough in the research of a protein structure, which is likely to develop related drugs It should be noted that even if the research capacity starts to be strengthened, the "decision-making power" and "autonomy" of China's R & D center are actually small in the global system, that is, whether the new drugs developed should be subject to clinical trials or not, and whether the clinical trials should be stopped when there is preliminary data feedback from the headquarters In this regard, the most regrettable is the R & D center of GSK China, a British pharmaceutical company GSK China R & D center, founded in 2007, is GSK's third largest R & D center in the world, which leads the company's work in the global neuroscience treatment project The so-called leading means that the company has the right to make some major decisions mentioned above, and can command the R & D work of the R & D center in other regions of GSK in the field of neuroscience treatment project In short, it is not a "chess piece" It's the people who play chess But in 2013, the same year that the GSK marketing system broke out in bribery scandal, the R & D center was accused of data fraud, and its head also left Therefore, it is not clear how much decision-making power there is In China, of course, foreign-funded enterprises also make some "characteristics", such as using compounds extracted from traditional Chinese medicine to try to develop, while in modern pharmacology, compounds are mostly synthetic At least two multinational giants are doing such things In August 2001, Novartis, a Swiss enterprise, cooperated with Shanghai Pharmaceutical Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences to carry out a natural compound extraction project named "natural active substances in Chinese herbal medicines", with a cooperation amount of 4.5 million US dollars In 2012, GSK is also using Chinese R & D center to do similar things Pharmaceutical companies have stored thousands of compounds for this purpose Of course, it will take a long time to hope that the extracted compounds can be used to make heavy new drugs After all, how these natural compounds work is so complicated In addition to their own R & D, foreign pharmaceutical companies are actually focusing on innovative drugs that are rarely produced by domestic enterprises Hutchison Whampoa, a domestic enterprise, has researched a new anti-cancer drug, named "voritinib" Before entering the clinical trial, the drug was looked upon by the British Pharmaceutical Company AstraZeneca in December 2011 AstraZeneca will be responsible for the development of voritinib in the world except China and bear all the research and development costs Hutchison Whampoa has received a down payment of US $20 million If the clinical development is successful and the initial sales performance is good, Hutchison Whampoa medicine will probably obtain as much as US $120 million in revenue Foreign companies are still looking at these opportunities Zhang Zhimin, global vice president of Johnson & Johnson business cooperation, once said when communicating with the author that now researchers of Chinese enterprises and institutions have put forward some advanced theories in the earlier stage of drug research and development process Considering that the R & D process of a drug is about 10 to 12 years, in the next five years or so, when these drugs are likely to enter the development stage, we can see a lot of China's first new drugs Of course, on the whole, the investment of foreign pharmaceutical companies in China is not as small as that in the world In 2012, foreign companies invested more than 8 billion yuan in R & D in China, while each of the top ten pharmaceutical companies invested more than 4 billion dollars in R & D in the world