Posted by Michael Wonder on 07 Apr 2019
Can cheaper drugs help home-grown labs turn the table on foreign Big Pharma in China’s cancer treatment market?
6 April 2019 - Nearly a quarter of the world’s newly diagnosed cancer cases in 2015 were in China.
A war is being waged in China’s market for cancer drugs, where home-grown laboratories must strike a delicate balance between social responsibility and cash flow in a long-term strategy to occupy the lion’s share of sales of immuno-oncology treatments.
The most ferocious battle front is in the category of immunotherapy drugs called PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors, which activate patients’ own immune systems to fight cancer tumours. The payback can be enormous in a market where annual sales of cancer drugs may rise by 90 per cent to 262 billion yuan (US$39 billion) by 2022, according to market research consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
