China overtakes India in drug testing
Monday, 3 September 2007
Andrew Jack from London and Amy Yee from New Delhi
CHINA has overtaken India as one of the fastest-growing locations for drug trials, in a fresh sign of the importance of the world's most populous country to the pharmaceutical industry.
An analysis by the Financial Times of data on www.clinicaltrials.gov, one of the most comprehensive websites where researchers register their studies, shows that China has 274 clinical trials under way, compared with 260 in India.
That site also indicates that China now has a cumulative total of 510 completed or ongoing trials compared with 471 in India, which had until recently been ahead on both measures.
The trend reflects intensifying interest by the healthcare sector in China, which is growing rapidly as a result of rising income and expanding health coverage and is already forecast to be the world's fifth-largest pharmaceuticals market by 2010.
Daniel Vasella, chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, warned earlier this month that he was likely to switch substantial future funding that could have gone to India to other countries, including China, because of a recent court ruling on patents.
As they seek to reduce the escalating costs and speed up the conduct of the clinical trials necessary to win regulatory approval for new medicines, drug companies are increasingly shifting tests from the US and western Europe to eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.
India and China have both received increased attention by pharmaceutical companies in recent years, reflecting a strong medical infrastructure, substantially lower costs and the relative ease of recruiting patients with diseases under investigation -- which allows trials to be launched more rapidly.
Drug companies are also increasingly obliged by regulators in both countries to include a proportion of local patients in their trials as a condition of approval, partly to demonstrate that the medicines are effective in Asian populations.
The government in China -- like that in India -- still raises concerns about the extent of intellectual property protection, quality, slow regulatory approval and difficulties in exporting blood and tissue samples from patients for analysis in laboratories abroad.
However, pharmaceutical groups including AstraZeneca, Novartis and Roche have committed substantial sums in recent years to open research and development centres in China.
Drug companies and other researchers are increasingly required publicly to register details of their clinical trials to ensure transparency and fair use of the results, both by governments and medical journal editors seeking to raise standards.
Clinicaltrials.gov, run by the US National Institutes of Health, is one of the most comprehensive websites in the sector, listing nearly 40,000 trials around the world.
Under syndication arrangement with FE
CHINA has overtaken India as one of the fastest-growing locations for drug trials, in a fresh sign of the importance of the world's most populous country to the pharmaceutical industry.
An analysis by the Financial Times of data on www.clinicaltrials.gov, one of the most comprehensive websites where researchers register their studies, shows that China has 274 clinical trials under way, compared with 260 in India.
That site also indicates that China now has a cumulative total of 510 completed or ongoing trials compared with 471 in India, which had until recently been ahead on both measures.
The trend reflects intensifying interest by the healthcare sector in China, which is growing rapidly as a result of rising income and expanding health coverage and is already forecast to be the world's fifth-largest pharmaceuticals market by 2010.
Daniel Vasella, chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, warned earlier this month that he was likely to switch substantial future funding that could have gone to India to other countries, including China, because of a recent court ruling on patents.
As they seek to reduce the escalating costs and speed up the conduct of the clinical trials necessary to win regulatory approval for new medicines, drug companies are increasingly shifting tests from the US and western Europe to eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.
India and China have both received increased attention by pharmaceutical companies in recent years, reflecting a strong medical infrastructure, substantially lower costs and the relative ease of recruiting patients with diseases under investigation -- which allows trials to be launched more rapidly.
Drug companies are also increasingly obliged by regulators in both countries to include a proportion of local patients in their trials as a condition of approval, partly to demonstrate that the medicines are effective in Asian populations.
The government in China -- like that in India -- still raises concerns about the extent of intellectual property protection, quality, slow regulatory approval and difficulties in exporting blood and tissue samples from patients for analysis in laboratories abroad.
However, pharmaceutical groups including AstraZeneca, Novartis and Roche have committed substantial sums in recent years to open research and development centres in China.
Drug companies and other researchers are increasingly required publicly to register details of their clinical trials to ensure transparency and fair use of the results, both by governments and medical journal editors seeking to raise standards.
Clinicaltrials.gov, run by the US National Institutes of Health, is one of the most comprehensive websites in the sector, listing nearly 40,000 trials around the world.
Under syndication arrangement with FE