All-out innovation

China’s long-established reputation as a pharma manufacturing giant has been in many ways matched by its recent standing as a hub for innovation, a breeding ground for excellence and home to some of the most forward-thinking minds in the industry. Even as many multinationals were professing a desire to shift their focus, some of the biggest players were bucking that trend and throwing their weight behind what they saw as a centre of excellence, something evidenced by the presence of GSK, Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Takeda at the 2024 CFD conference, widely seen as the largest gathering of multinational pharma CEOs there since the global lockdown.

US trade issues aside, Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, was heard to compliment China’s large market opportunity and pledge a commitment to “expand the biopharmaceutical industry in China”, something borne out by the fact that its pharmaceutical market is expected to be worth over $160 billion this year, not to mention the sheer volume of reforms being undertaken by the CFDA lately. China, along with India, still accounts for a significant proportion of global API production in the US – up to 80 per cent according to some sources, although USChina.org suggests a smaller figure. But what is not in doubt is its value as an open market for API suppliers and a booming biotech scene which is increasingly attracting new waves of inward investment.

Leading lights include Sinopharma Group, Hubei Biocause and Shanghai Pharmaceutical, according to Forbes who rated them by asset value, along with the liked of new faces such as Hengrui Pharmaceuticals which is already making an impression in the international stage by partnering with Elvar Therapeutics.

But that’s only part of the story. There is another sector showing signs of rapid growth. It appears there’s something of revolution under way, driven by the advances in automation and artificial intelligence within the manufacturing sector, injecting momentum in terms of sustainable growth and reshaping the once labour-intensive factory floors.

In the past three years alone, China has been at the forefront of industrial innovation, launching more than 400 showcase smart factories, backed by more than 10,000 provincial-level digital workshops and intelligent plants. China’s large-scale AI models have also entered a period of rapid development, language processing, machine vision and multimodal capabilities.

In tandem, and with the support of universities and research institutions, China has developed systematic R&D capabilities that encompass a range of theoretical methods and software and hardware technologies. Some estimates suggest that China has developed more than 200 large-scale AI models, across a number of sectors with expanding application scenarios. In fact, data held by the Cyberspace Administration of China, suggested they had validated 117 generative AI services as of March this year. China’s registered AI-related companies totaled 1.57 million in 2023, data from the Chinese Information provider Qichacha.com has revealed. Jin Zhuanglong, head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently outlined four major targets; accelerate the upgrading of traditional industries; improve the leading position of advantageous industries; actively foster emerging and future industries and promote new AI-enabled industrialisation.

“As strategic emerging industries account for 13 per cent of China’s GDP, one of the key priorities for 2024 is the effort to actively develop new productive forces,” Jin said. “AI is a strategic technology that will lead the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation. AI has already been used in R&D, design and manufacturing, and has become an important driving force for the new industrialisations.”

To illustrate this, he pointed to the fact that China has built the world’s largest and most technologically advanced information and communication network, ranking second in terms of computing power, with R&D in 6G, quantum communication and other cutting-edge technologies in a world-leading position.

Another area in which international collaborations are proving fruitful is in the development of Personal Medicine something cemented by the signing of the Sino-EU PerMed project in 2020, a consortium of six partners from governmental, funding and research organisations to promote co-operation between Europe and China. That project has now ended but in many ways it kickstarted a greater effort by the European Commission to extend the scope of international collaboration.

PM has the potential to revolutionise healthcare by using Big Data to tailor treatments to individual patients. But it poses technological and sustainability challenges, which the Consortium was set up to address. It hailed among its achievements a clearer overview of the research and innovation landscape on PM in China and created a patents’ database. Problems remain, such as barriers to collaboration via protection regulations. While health-related data in Europe belongs to an individual, it is treated as a national priority in China.

It was also welcomed by the respected National Human Genome Research Institute which described it as an opportunity to convert the “one size fits all” approach to diagnostics and drug therapy and prevention into more individual approach. It also went some way to improving wide relations with the EU. Gianni D’Errico of Toscana Life Sciences said that, while there has been an increased focus on PM in the past five years, he expects the trend to “increase dramatically. An important aspect will be a public-private partnership that will de-risk investments as well as the creation of innovative start-ups that will bring personalised medicine closer and closer to patients and citizens.”

As for why China is key to this, he told Euractiv: “Since 2005, China has become the second largest spender on research and development globally. In 2016 the announcement of the China Precision Medicine Initiative – a 15-year-program worth $9.2 billion – has radically changes in personalised medicine.”

When asked how confident he was that the project will be a catalyst for any future co-operation between the EU and China on PM, he said: “In parallel with the Sino-EU Permed project we have launched the European Partnership on Personalised Medicine (EP PerMed), which gathers 59 Partners and will invest close to €400 million in personalised medicine over the next years. One of the pillars of the EP PerMed is international collaboration where the outcome of the Sino-EU PerMed has been included and the work will continue. The relationship with Chinese stakeholders will be maintained through this new initiative and hopefully, we will have a Chinese policy maker or funding agency joining the ICPerMed soon.”

Collaboration has always been key to developing Personalised Medicine concepts. A number of European initiatives known as ICPerMed Family projects have spawned collaborations with Latin-American Countries, China and Africa. The Chine “Sino-EU PerMed” project started in January 2020, backed by €2 million grant from the Europen Framework Programme Horizon 2020. The consortium comprised six research organisations in Europe and China, namely the German Aerospace Centre – Project Management Agency (co-ordinator), Fondazione Toscana Life Sciences, Innovation Fund Transfer Center and Guangzhou Insitutes of Biomedicine and Health.

It resulted in two policy briefs: one focused on science and technology co-operation, and the other on ethical, legal and societal aspects in a bid to provide a framework for future co-operation.