Ancient Chinese cures enter drugmakers’ portfolios
Pharmaceutical firms looking for new revenue
The world’s biggest drugmakers are turning to ancient Chinese remedies to boost product pipelines.
GlaxoSmithKline Plc is testing botanicals — compounds extracted from plants — for immune disorders, Sanofi plans to turn traditional Chinese medicines into alternative diabetes and cancer therapies, and Nestle SA teamed up last month with billionaire Li Ka-Shing to develop a drug derived from ancient Chinese approaches to cure inflammatory bowel disease.
The confluence of China’s growing middle class and pharmaceutical companies’ need to find new revenue have combined to give western drugmakers an increasingly open mind about a 2,500-yearold form of medicine they once scoffed at.
“You have 1.3 billion people, many of whom cannot afford western medicines and who believe that traditional Chinese medicines are good enough,” said Bloomberg Industries analyst Sam Fazeli. “If they can manufacture it on a meaningful scale, and do it with the stamp of a Glaxo or a Sanofi on it, perhaps the consumer will be more interested in buying it than something that’s boiled up in a vat somewhere.”
China’s market for traditional drugs, excluding raw herbs and highly purified compounds extracted from herbs, was $13 billion in 2011 and could grow 14 per cent annually over the next five years, according to consultancy McKinsey and Co. Of last year’s total, $6 billion came from medicines sold over the counter, accounting for almost half of China’s market for non-prescription drugs, the consultancy said.
Less stringent U.S. rules for approving plant-based treatments may give drugmakers a quicker path to creating medicines, with more than 500 applications to test treatments lodged with the Food and Drug Administration. Previous attempts to break down herbal medicines into single ingredients failed to yield major breakthroughs so western drugmakers now target mixtures inspired by ancient recipes to sell globally and in China.
Combining western science with traditional cures is an approach that already ex- tends to Glaxo’s research centre in Shanghai. Sick workers can tap an alternative Chinese therapy using suction cups made of glass, as well as the pharmaceuticals that generate most of the Brentford, U.K.-based company’s $44 billion of annual sales.
“Traditional medicine has been practised for thousands of years but it has always been based on clinical experience and not so much on clinical evidence like western medicine,” said Zang Jingwu, Glaxo’s head of China research and development. “Our strategy is to integrate existing traditional knowledge of diseases with modern drug discovery technology.”
The U.S. FDA introduced new guidelines for botanical treatments in 2004, applying less strict conditions compared to those imposed on chemical and biological drugs seeking approval. That opened up a new avenue for producers to replenish their medical research pipelines and replace expiring patents.
It’s no longer essential to identify the active constituents of botanical drugs, while products legally used as dietary supplements in the U.S. with no known safety issues may provide “markedly reduced” information on their toxicology, according to the U.S. regulator.
“Almost all botanicals are complex natural mixtures that are difficult to have full chemical characterization and will need flexibility in regulatory approaches,” said Shaw Chen, who leads the FDA’s botanical review team. The guidelines are “intended to facilitate more development of new treatments, especially for unmet medical needs,” he said.
China’s pharmaceuticals market is expected to grow as much as 18 per cent annually to $165 billion by 2016 to make it the world’s second-largest market after the U.S.