China R&D Reader

All global large pharmaceutical companies have R&D centers in China, but they are using different models in their R&D efforts.
Top R&D leaders from global pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Roche, AstraZeneca and Merck, explained their R&D models and lessons learned from the past years in a roundtable discussion at the Asia Pharma R&D Leaders [...]

Millipore Corporation, a leading life science company, and Merck & Co. Inc., a global pharmaceutical and chemicals company, entered into a definitive agreement under which Merck will acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of Millipore for US$107 per share in cash, or a total transaction value, including net debt, of approximately €5.3 billion (US$7.2 [...]

Three of big pharma’s biggest companies, Merck, Lilly and Pfizer, have banded together to create an Asian not-for-profit company that will construct a pharmacogenomic cancer database in Singapore. The database will compile its information using 2,000 tissue samples from patients with lung and gastric cancer. The information will be made available to researchers with the [...]

2009年世界制药巨头紧抓着我国医改之政策，纷纷抢占我国医药市场份额。寄望业内人士要保持足够的警醒，若国内市场我们不再想法保全的话，未来几年，国内医药市场也将无立足之地。

HANGZHOU, China – April 21, 2009 – Sanofi-aventis (EURONEXT: SAN and NYSE: SNY) announced today that the company will relocate its current manufacturing facility from downtown Hangzhou and build a new manufacturing site in Binjiang New Development Zone. This new site represents an investment of 270 million Renminbi (31 million Euro).

Swiss drug maker Novartis said yesterday its China sales rose 29 percent boosted by its patent drugs and indicated that it would launch six new drugs in the domestic market this year.
Sales rose to 3.3 billion yuan ($428.13 million) in 2008 and expects it will register a 30 percent growth this year, senior company executives [...]

You all know what AstraZeneca CEO David Brennan said last week about big mergers: Not for us; we don’t need it. So what does it need to do to overcome the litany of challenges that face every drugmaker these days? In an interview with The Economist, Brennan says AstraZeneca will cut costs–he doesn’t need a [...]

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is planning to strip itself down closer to the bare bones of the business through further outsourcing and offshoring, with hopes of making itself into a lean, mean, pharma machine.
The pharma heavyweight announced a sweeping restructuring plan in the form of an ‘Operational Excellence’ programme, designed to achieve savings of up to £700m [...]

Following in AstraZeneca’s footsteps, Novartis is investing $100 million in an R&D center in China. It’s a move I had alluded to in an earlier piece in this forum. Expect other big pharma companies to follow.
Those who look at a move like this as merely a cost-cutting measure are missing one of the more obvious [...]

Eli Lilly and Novartis have made substantial investments in investigator training in China recently. Both companies are planning to make a big play there. Novartis has already said that it’s opening an R&D center in Shanghai this year. Lilly has not made its plans public.
With a population of 1.3 billion and a centralized healthcare system [...]