While taking strides to go global, China’s medical technology sector is overtaking and leading the world in some fields, such as cell therapy, gene editing, various medical equipments and certain cancer treatments, said Leon Wang, Executive Vice President International and China Unit President at AstraZeneca, during a media interview at the seventh Astra-Zeneca China Ecosystem Conference, which was held in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. According to AstraZeneca, the company has proactively promoted two-way exchanges and cooperation in the global health innovation ecosystem to link market opportunities around the globe over the past few years. More than 130 innovative Chinese enterprises have been involved in such initiatives of the company since 2023. China is a base for developing country markets for AstraZeneca. Wang said that reality gives the company an edge in understanding such markets well and knowing which countries to begin with when Chinese enterprises kick off their plans to go global. “We usually recommend they begin with big countries that are also very friendly to China. Many such countries, such as Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Mexico, have populations of over 100 million, which translates into substantial market demand,” he said.
For example, Amoy Diagnostics (AmoyDx), based in Xiamen, Fujian province, and founded in 2008, has joined hands with AstraZeneca for a decade. The latter has supported the export of AmoyDx’s products, including those used in gene mutation tests and nucleic acid extraction, to more than 50 countries and regions. Since 2020, AstraZeneca has also supported the products of AmoyDx to enter 32 oncology-related molecular diagnostic laboratories in 16 countries and regions. Currently, AmoyDx is collaborating with AstraZeneca in the development of oncology diagnostics for several cancer types, including lung cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer.
Industry insiders expect that the enthusiasm for domestic innovative therapies to go overseas will continue this year. As of the end of April, there had been 25 foreign licensing projects for domestic innovative drugs, a 56% year-on-year increase, and total cumulative transactions exceeded USD10 billion. The 25 projects involved multiple areas, such as antibodies and antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) drugs, a newly emerging class of highly potent pharmaceutical therapies, usually for treating cancer.
Ding Sheng, Director of the Beijing-based Global Health Drug Discovery Institute, said the reason that China-developed ADC drugs are favored by multinational pharmaceutical companies is the increased domestic policy support for research and development (R&D) and innovation as well as the rising R&D strength of domestic enterprises. “Although domestic R&D of ADC drugs started late, the technology of domestic players in this sector has caught up quickly, and is currently almost no different from advanced international levels,” he said. During the conference themed “Accelerating health innovation, deepening global partnership” in Wuxi, AstraZeneca and five Wuxi-based local innovative biomedical enterprises released a collaborative overseas plan for this year. The initiative is aimed at assisting the enterprises to facilitate cross-border cooperation and exchanges in pharmaceutical innovation, the China Daily reports.
