16 years ago, China accounted for less than eight percent of the world’s clinical trials. Today it hosts more than any other country. This story – of patient populations, regulatory frameworks, and biotech ecosystems that were once peripheral to global drug development becoming central to it – is being repeated across Asia. But scale and…
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Korea, the world’s 13th-largest pharma market, is rolling out its biggest reform to pharma pricing in a generation, slashing what it pays for generics and using the savings to get innovative medicines to patients faster and at better prices. The same squeeze on generic margins, combined with new rewards for R&D, aims to push domestic…
USA Putting Generics and Biosimilars First: Sustaining the Cornerstone of Affordable Healthcare in the US
Falling prices are squeezing US generic and biosimilar manufacturers too hard, argues John Murphy III, President and CEO of the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM). Generic prices have dropped an average of 7.7 percent a year over the past five years while medical inflation ran at 6.2 percent, and Murphy warns this could lead to…
Novo Nordisk has rebranded as ‘Novo’ and plans to enter new therapeutic areas as part of CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar’s push to reinvigorate growth. The company has already reinvented itself once in recent memory. Faced with flatlining sales in the late 2010s, Novo transformed from a narrow diabetes specialist into one of the world’s leading…
In Conversation
Christoph Hamann – General Manager, Merck Healthcare Korea
“ We have set a goal that by 2027, more than 740,000 Korean patients will be benefiting from our treatments ”
Tomas Mihal – General Manager Germany, STADA
“ Our aim is clear: continue to outgrow the German market ”
Thomas Seewoester – VP Site Operations, Amgen Manufacturing Limited, LLC
“ For more than 30 years, we have continued to invest, introduce new technologies, and develop deep technical expertise within our workforce that we now deploy across the wider Amgen network ”
Luigi Longinotti – SVP EMEA, Recordati Rare Diseases
“ Whether there are 20 patients in one country or many more across the world, our objective is always the same: to ensure they can benefit from innovation as quickly as possible ”
Dámaso Molero Sánchez – CEO, 3PBIOVIAN
“ We need to build a successful and sustainable business while contributing to a future in which treatments are accessible ”
Chang Woo Lee – CEO, CUROGEN
“ Building stronger bridges between Korean biotech companies and global capital will be critical to unlocking the ecosystem’s full potential ”
Syed T. Husain – Chairman and CEO, Made Scientific
“ Innovators should hold CDMOs to a high bar, and CDMOs need to step up ”
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InFocus
China has rapidly become the world’s leading country for clinical trial volume, alongside the stratospheric growth of its local biotech industry, which now accounts for almost a third of the global drug development pipeline. The high speed and low cost of Chinese trials are unmatched globally. However, in a volatile geopolitical environment and with some…
Korea’s position as a clinical trials hub did not happen overnight. The country has treated clinical development as a matter of deliberate government policy for the better part of two decades, with Korea ranking among the world’s leading trial destinations as far back as 2018; years before China’s biotech ambitions fully took off. That sustained…
Taiwan’s population of just 23 million people and contested political status should, in theory, harm its chances of becoming a globally relevant clinical trials hub. In fact, these two factors – which have forced the island to adopt the most rigorous international standards and build a dense web of global partnerships – might ultimately be…
Japan is resetting itself as a clinical trial destination. Costs have halved, local data requirements are being relaxed, and the country is actively courting the global biotechs that have long overlooked it for trials. The opportunity is real; but so is the ground Japan still must make up. Japan’s importance to the global biopharmaceutical…
