Don’t Paint China And India With The Same Opportunity Brush, Speakers Say
This article was originally published in The Pink Sheet Daily
Executive Summary
China's development track is more "insular" while India is looking to establish a global reach.
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SAN DIEGO - By 2020 India will be a major global pharmaceutical player across the board, differentiating itself clearly against China, with which it is often grouped in outsourcing discussions, Advinus Therapeutics CEO Rashmi Barbhaiya said June 16 at the dual-focused Burrill China/India Life Sciences Meeting. Many Westerners naively believe that "what we might do in India and what we might do in China are very much the same," but the opportunities will be very different in even ten years, Burrill & Co. CEO Steven Burrill said in his introduction of a session designed to contrast opportunities in the two countries. India will build on its expertise in generics and active pharmaceutical ingredients, discovering "many" new chemical entities by 2020, including three for neglected diseases, thereby attracting new partnering opportunities for Western biopharmas, Barbhaiya predicted. In addition, pivotal clinical trial data from India's contract research organizations will be accepted by Western regulatory agencies and Indian discovery drug companies will be key contributors to pharmacogenomic-based drug development. India will be a leader in the manufacture of patent protected API, biologics and drug products, he said. On the question of whether the U.S. will go into China or India, Barbhaiya said, "Once you shift to innovation, companies will have to come to you." China's development track is more insular. In his remarks, Hongguang Wang, director general of the China National Center for Biotech Development, focused on the nation's massive ongoing infrastructure build-up, which features national and regional incubator parks and generous government funding. China "can get to your goals without the rest of us," Burrill quipped, adding that for India the quest is to establish a global reach. Government funding for start-up biotechs in China tends to come without strings attached and can be remarkably similar to funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, members of an earlier panel of Chinese biotech venture investors said, adding that nondilutive government funding is readily available from a number of local and regional sources. But further downstream, Chinese start-ups with an eye to overseas fundraising may run into complex legal issues. Where the company legally resides dictates the markets in which it can trade, and imaginative corporate structures are developing to support their efforts to go global. "Clever lawyers and clever companies find ways to walk around regulations," said Michael Yang, managing director, greater China and Asia, for NYSE Euronext. -Shirley Haley ([email protected]) [Editor's note: This article appears courtesy of 1 PharmAsia News, F-D-C Reports' new site for Asian biotech and pharmaceutical news. To register for a 30-day risk free trial, visit www.pharmasianews.com.] |