California Life Sciences to Partner with China

Posted under BIOCOM, Blog, China, Companies, Diagnostics, Emerging Markets, Funding, Global, IP, leadership, Life Science, Market Access, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Pharmaceuticals, R&D, Startups, Universities, Videos by Ben Comer

BIOCOM, a trade group representing Southern California’s life sciences industry, is ramping up partnership efforts in China to meet an emerging desire for novel drug therapies.

While intellectual property (IP) protections and the Chinese government’s willingness to pay for expensive new products represent two large and lingering question marks, Joe Panetta, president and CEO at BIOCOM, said his last trip to China was surprising.

“We visited one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in China – Yangtze River Pharmaceuticals – which is pretty strongly government-backed and which has been long known to be a generics and traditional Chinese medicine company,” said Panetta, noting a statue of Mao Zedong in the company’s courtyard. “When I got there, not only did I see their long-established generics manufacturing facilities, but I also saw their 14- and 10-story innovative research towers that are under construction. They assured me that the future for them is not in generics, and the CEO said clearly to us: ‘I want to meet companies in San Diego, and I want to access new therapies that we can commercialize here.’”

Panetta said a portion of China’s population – by some estimates a portion as large as the total US population, according to Panetta – is becoming increasingly affluent, and has the “desire to access new therapies as well as the means to access new therapies.”

Despite a rising tide of affluence in major cities, many people living in China’s outer provinces are still in need of basic medical services, a problem China’s ambitious, $125 billion health reform initiative hopes to alleviate. “First they have to build delivery centers, and [the Chinese government] is talking about building hundreds of hospitals and thousands of clinics throughout the provinces in China, and they have to first deliver basic therapies and diagnostics and devices, but the question is how soon will it be before the government begins to take an interest in more innovative technologies,” said Panetta. “They have a long way to go, but to me, what that says is that there’s a lot of opportunity for a long time in China.”

The best way to enter the Chinese market is through partnerships, said Panetta, citing talks with companies residing in “large biotech parks in Shanghai and Beijing, and the China Medical City that’s being built from the ground up in Taizhou,” as well as US and European pharmaceutical companies that have a presence in China. “The Chinese would love for our companies to go over there and set up shop,” said Panetta. “What they tell us is that they want to learn how to innovate…I think the payback for our companies is clearly the 1.3 billion person market in China.”

BIOCOM hopes to facilitate partnerships with Chinese companies through conferences and trips to China, in order to “understand who we can build relationships with, what those relationships need to look like, and where we can build those relationships,” said Panetta. “[US] companies need to be careful about how much of their intellectual property they take to China when they create partnerships, and how much they keep [in the US],” said Panetta, and concerns remain about the level of talent and skill that exists, beyond the research level. “Several years ago, the discussion on Asia tended to gravitate toward outsourcing, low-cost research and low-cost early stage discovery efforts,” said Panetta. “That’s changed pretty drastically. It’s a terrific opportunity four our life sciences industry in Southern California,” he said.

First Chinese Product Development Partnership Targets Tuberculosis, Malaria, AIDS

Posted under Blog, Companies, Corporate Responsibility, Deals, Diagnostics, Emerging Markets, Funding, Global, IP, Market Access, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Not-for-profit, patient compliance, Pharmaceuticals, R&D, Startups, Technology, Translational Sciences, Universities, Videos by Ben Comer

A Chinese scientific foundation and a not-for-profit tuberculosis organization announced a partnership aimed at developing new medicines for underserved public health diseases.

Billed as the first Chinese product development partnership (PDP), the Global Health R&D Center of China (GHRC) hopes to discover and develop new treatments for tuberculosis (TB) and other diseases by collaborating with pharmaceutical companies, the Chinese government, academic institutions and other groups, according to a statement.

The GHRC was created through a partnership between The International Scientific Exchange Foundation of China (ISEFC), a translational sciences group, and the TB Alliance, a not-for-profit organization focused on developing new and better TB medications.

Mel Spigelman, president and CEO of the TB Alliance, said in an email that pharmaceutical companies stand to gain from sharing resources, such as intellectual property, with the GHRC. “The GHRC will offer companies financial and world-class discovery and clinical development resources to advance compounds for neglected diseases that they otherwise may not be able to [develop] on their own,” said Spigelman. “In addition, companies will establish strong working relationships with key discovery, regulatory, and clinical resources in the fastest-growing pharmaceutical market in the world.”

The TB Alliance has drug development partnerships with AstraZeneca, Bayer, GSK, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, and Tibotec, and is currently managing three drug candidates in clinical trials, according to organization’s website. Spigelman declined to specify which compounds the TB Alliance itself will contribute to the GHRC.

“The vision of the GHRC is to focus on translational medicine for public health and bridge the innovation gap that currently exists into new treatments and cures,” said Geng Jianyue, secretary-general assistant of the ISEFC, in a statement. In China alone, some 1.3 million people develop active TB annually, and 150,000 die from the disease each year, according to the TB Alliance.

A recent World Health Organization (WHO) report found that only a 10% of the multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) cases identified globally received treatment in 2009. The WHO report called multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis a global epidemic, and TB in general kills almost 2 million people each year, according to the TB Alliance. The announcement of the GHRC coincides with World TB Day, which is celebrated on March 24 each year, to commemorate Robert Koch’s discovery of TB bacillus, the cause of the disease.

While access to treatment remains a major problem in many of the 27 countries most burdened with MDR-TB, the treatments themselves, many over forty years old, present further difficulties, since first-line drugs like isoniazid, ethambutol, pyrazinamide and rifampin require a six to nine month regimen. Failure to adhere to a treatment regimen can result in drug resistant strains of TB, which require second-line drugs, many with severe side effects.

In addition to developing new TB treatments and addressing other public health diseases in China, the GHRC will also develop compounds for the rest of the developing world, according to Spigelman. “Global development programs will likely be partnered with disease-specific PDPs or with global pharmaceutical companies, who will then work with GHRC to register the compounds throughout the world,” he said.