China R&D Reader

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 [...]

Syngenta Biotechnology, a division of the Swiss giant agribusiness company Syngenta (NYSE: SYT), has begun construction of an R&D center in Beijing. When the company announced its intention to build the center, it committed $100 million to developing the project over the next five years. The China facility will concentrate on evaluating genetic modifications for [...]

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 [...]

Quintiles has consolidated its China-based Global Central Laboratories and Clinical Development Services (CDS) businesses into a new, 17,000-square-foot facility in Sun Dong Ann Plaza in Beijing. The new site is larger than the CRO’s original laboratory located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH). The CDS plans to grow to a staff of more [...]

MDS PharmaServices has expanded its services in China, adding significant capacity to its existing central laboratory in Beijing.
The 25,000 sq. ft. addition to the site has given the firm a five-fold increase in testing capacity, four times the amount of space to produce clinical trial kits, and a wider range of specialised clinical trial testing [...]

Bridge Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a global leader in preclinical drug testing with facilities in the US and China, today announced initiation of a Visiting Scholar Program for its employees. This program will provide full support for qualified US employees to relocate and cross train in Bridge’s laboratories in Beijing, China or alternatively, for its qualified China [...]

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 [...]

Accelovance, a Maryland, US-based contract research organization (CRO) with a fully owned subsidiary in China announced yesterday that it had opened an office in Shanghai, its second in that country.
According to the announcement, the new office will allow the company to broaden its services and expand its capacity for conducting Phase I-IV clinical trials in [...]