https://thechinaacademy.org/chinas-biopharmaceutical-industry-mirroring-success-in-electric-vehicles/ an intellectual content network dedicated to illustrating how key dynamics shape China's view on the world Mon, 10 Feb 2025 02:43:42 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 https://thechinaacademy.org/chinas-biopharmaceutical-industry-mirroring-success-in-electric-vehicles/#comment-9831 Mon, 13 Jan 2025 22:15:51 +0000 https://thechinaacademy.org/chinas-biopharmaceutical-industry-mirroring-success-in-electric-vehicles/#comment-9831 It is so reassuring to hear our biopharma industry is going great guns. Who does not remember in their back of their minds reflecting some personal experience how one antibiotic from the west could do miracle for pneumonia and high fever or your elderly would be brought back to life from a heart attack with some clot dissolving treatment on a drip or a neighbour saving her leg from amputation with shots of insulin discovered by Banting and Best. Yet today there is still a monopoly in the pharmaceutical industry controlled in the west and from monopoly comes hand in hand pricing power. We all live in the mercy of that monopoly. To be self-sufficient one must do the hard work. But is the western model the right one to emulate? To have profit to incentivize innovation? it has certainly worked well in the west where lifestyle drugs are the craze. The most popular drug -the must have for every modern women and sometimes men is Ozempic the diabetic drug that incidentally makes you lose weight. And who can overlook the power and market of the erectile dysfunction drugs – the allure of being Casanova is a dream come true for many. And anti wrinkle wonder drug Botox originally developed for trigeminal neuralgia with a market of 8 billions dollars. And the anti depressives with a market of 16 billions to help you with social anxiety disorder so you can be the life of the party. And then the biologics that treat auto-immune disorders costing tens of thousand and up annually. Your wallet or your life. Yet without China who would develop Artemisinin for the benefit of the global south. There is no money in antimalarials for big pharmaceuticals.
Hopefully with the right incentive and public policy the pharmaceutical industry in China will mature and succeed . Our lives depend on it.

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