Innovative drug market "cake" up to 4 trillion Chinese pharmaceutical companies can't bite a few

China accounts for only 1/60 of the global $600 billion market for innovative drugs. On the one hand, there is a huge market demand that needs to be met, while on the other hand, there is a backlog of approval of innovative drugs and weak research and development progress. In recent years, policies and capital have been actively promoted, but the research and development of new drugs has been criticized as "simple repetition", and the research and development of new drugs in cancer and other fields "get together", while children's medicine and other categories are relatively deserted.

In the field of pharmaceutical investment, new drugs 10 years of grinding a sword is almost the norm, innovative drugs have become a capital adventure game. After the continuous inflow of capital, drug research and development "not bad money", but the other side of the coin is the imbalance of capital, research and development early investors are few, and the later foreseeable stage of the new drug market, a large amount of capital is swarming. Then came the investment bubble. Some people in the industry also said that an appropriate bubble may be beneficial to the industry, but it also means that more institutions follow the trend to invest, and the professionalism and order of capital has become the voice of the industry.

Regulators and a large number of well-known pharmaceutical companies have focused on pharmaceutical innovation, and innovative drugs have become the most discussed topic.

The big cake of 4 trillion yuan in the innovative drug market is waiting to be divided, but Chinese pharmaceutical companies are quite weak.

According to the three echelons of innovation contribution distribution of major pharmaceutical R & D countries in the world, China is still in the third echelon, contributing less than 5% to global pharmaceutical innovation.

In addition, in the pharmaceutical innovation layout from low-end lean imitation to mid-end progressive innovation to the top of the original innovation in the three areas, China's pharmaceutical innovation has not yet climbed to the top of the tower, the current pharmaceutical innovation "quality" still needs to be improved, mostly incremental innovation. At present, the concept of new drugs has changed from "Chinese type" to "global type", which means that the new drugs needed are not simply repeated generic drugs.

Coinciding with the vigorous development of the innovative drug market, China's pharmaceutical industry, which is closely related to the lives of Chinese people, "aims" at the development goal from a big pharmaceutical country to a powerful pharmaceutical country.

According to the "Building a Sustainable Development of China's Pharmaceutical Innovation Ecosystem" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), the world's innovative drug market in 2015 was nearly 600 billion US dollars, which translates into about 4 trillion yuan.

It is worth mentioning that the research and development of innovative drugs is also playing an increasingly important role in Chinese medicine. Both policies, talents and investment have played a good driving role in innovative drugs. The number of articles published by Chinese insiders in top journals and the number of international drug patent applications have increased rapidly.

However, in this market of the order of hundreds of billions, China occupies less than $10 billion, of which 19 innovative products approved for the first time in China contributed less than $0.5 billion, and all sales of these products came from the Chinese market.

Judging from the current policy requirements, the economic cost gap between generic and innovative drugs is not large. The bottleneck of enterprises' research and development of innovative drugs is still due to the lack of technology. Innovation must come from relatively deep basic research. Generic drugs all use speed to win, but there is no unified standard for innovative drugs, and they need to practice their "internal skills" carefully. Because of the uncertainty of new drug research and development and the problem of cost performance, many pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to make innovative drugs. At present, most of the domestic targets are first found overseas, and then studied on this basis, all of which hope to produce products quickly but lack essential research, which is also one of the dilemmas of weak basic research.

In short, China's new drug innovation should be "difficult, isolated and preventive" drugs, not "pinch the softest persimmon", but put the limited funds in the most important place.

News source:http://www.y-lp.com/pages/Article.aspx?id=5065666817125081120

This news was re-edited and reorganized by the Huaxun team and added analytical comments.