BEIJING – The secret to the China market, said industry stakeholders during the 2013 BIO Convention in China this week, is to look for and fill unmet medical needs.
HONG KONG – Japan’s biotech stocks have fallen from the precipitous heights they reached through the first half of the year, coming down from a bubble that was driven by a combination of a cheap currency, government stimulus, a new health care policy and a Nobel Prize.
HONG KONG – Hospitals in China are using fewer targeted therapies for lung cancer than their Western counterparts, despite China having the world’s highest number of lung cancer patients and Asians being more susceptible to the disease than Westerners, a leading local oncologist has warned.
BEIJING – In its third year, the BIO Convention in China is billed as a gathering aimed at strengthening ties between Western biopharmas and members of the emerging Chinese biopharma market.
• Sinovac Biotech Ltd., of Beijing, said it was selected by the Jiangsu Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to supply the company’s inactivated hepatitis A vaccine, Healive, under the expanded program of immunization in 2014, to the pediatric population in Jiangsu Province.
BEIJING – In the shadow of the Third Plenum – a gathering this week of China’s ruling Communist Party members who likely will deliver major government reforms – and the day after what’s billed as the world’s biggest e-commerce shopping spree known as Singles Day (during which Chinese consumers spent an estimated $5 billion), biopharmaceutical executives gathered at BIO’s Convention in China to sort through the challenges of this flummoxed industry.
Biopharma regulators across Asia are undergoing major restructuring as China, India and other countries seek to protect their share of drug exports in the face of stiffer manufacturing compliance demands in the West and pressure to adopt international standards.
SHANGHAI – For Shenogen, one of the growing number of innovative drug development companies in China, industry accolades are a welcome acknowledgement of years of hard work.
HONG KONG – Authorities in China are working to plug a regulatory hole related to post-market studies for new chemical entities (NCE) and biological drugs.
• Prana Biotechnology Ltd., of Melbourne, Australia, said an article in the peer-reviewed journal Aging Cell showed favorable effects of PBT2 on neurogenesis and in reversing the memory and learning losses associated with the aging process, in normal (i.e., nontransgenic) old mice.