The central government plans to invest 1 billion yuan (US$120
million) over the next three years to encourage domestic
researchers and pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs
instead of simply copying existing medications, according to a
leading scientist in Shanghai.
The new program marks a massive increase in spending on
pharmaceutical research - with the government coughing up 10 times
as much money as it spent on research from 1996 to 2000 - and will
see traditional Chinese medicine treated equally to Western drugs
for the first time.
"The project comes at a critical moment to awaken the country's
drugmakers to develop their own ideas," said Yang Shengli, a
professor with the Shanghai Research Center of Biotechnology.
Currently, the country's total 6,000-plus pharmaceutical developers
own patents on less than 2 percent of the drug formulas on the
domestic market. Many of the companies specialize in tinkering with
foreign drugs to create their own medicines.
If
China really wants to develop its pharmaceutical industry, it must
merge some of its smaller companies together to create firms large
enough to handle the costs of a proper research program, said Chen
Kaixian, director of the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica.
Companies should also sign exclusive deals with the country's
numerous re-search institutes and universities, Chen added.
He
said scientists in Shanghai will cooperate with counterparts in
Yunnan Province to find the active ingredients in more than 3,000
traditional Chinese herbs, and then find a way to turn those
ingredients into marketable drugs.
Currently, most traditional Chinese medications are sold in herb
form, requiring users to boil them before use, which puts the
products at a marketing disadvantage compared with Western pills
and syrups.
Chen believes China's abundant herbal resources hold the answers to
the complicated diseases that can not be cured with other
medications.
For example, he said, a natural alkaline known as shishajian have
been proven effective in the treatment of senile dementia, and a
herbaceous plant known as qinsong works well in treating
malaria.
"Unfortunately, we have only made partial efforts in making full
use of our biological resources," said Chen.
He
noted that researchers know the active ingredients in only 2,000 of
the country's 10,000 most-popular herbal medications, and little
work is being done to expand on that knowledge. Most pharmaceutical
companies in China work to combine herbs to create a new drug they
can patent, instead of isolating active ingredients.
"Domestic researchers should do more to uncover the functioning
ingredients instead of the combining functions in new Chinese
medicines," said Chen, adding that it is more difficult to control
the dosage and effectiveness of a herb than of a pill.
Cao Jinyan, vice director of the Beijing-based Intellectual
Property Development Research Center, said Chinese researchers own
more than 80 percent of drug patents within the country but most of
them are for a combination of herbs instead of a single
ingredient.
(eastday.com April 24,
2002)