23 March 2019 - China pledged to improve its system for registering new drugs in the country this year and more closely monitor those medicines after they’ve entered the market, part of a series of rapid health care reforms that seek to lower costs and improve the quality of drugs.

"We are going to identify a new framework of the administration measures for drug registration," Wang Ping, Director-General of the Department of Drug Registration at the National Medical Products Administration, said at a forum in Beijing on Saturday. "We also want to work closely with pharmaceutical companies and strengthen monitoring and surveillance after the new drug has been launched into the market."

Facing pressure from its growing middle class to gain access to the best drugs and health care available, Beijing is now approving novel drugs from foreign pharmaceuticals like Pfizer and Novartis as quickly as U.S. or European regulators are. Where patients once had to travel outside of the country to get life-saving medication, China is now determined to make sure its citizens, who have some of the highest rates of cancer, diabetes and liver disease in the world, can get direct access to top drugs first.

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