When it comes to the re­forms at Chi­na’s drug agency, now un­der­go­ing a name change, pol­i­cy changes and even their out­comes are rel­a­tive­ly easy to spot, but num­bers are hard­er to come by. In a year­ly re­port re­leased last week, though, the agency of­fered some rare sta­tis­tics to track its progress over the past few years and il­lu­mi­nate R&D pri­or­i­ties in the coun­try.

The re­port high­lights some big trends that have ma­jor im­pli­ca­tions for all com­pa­nies look­ing to land a mar­ket­ing OK and roll out new drugs in the boom­ing Asian mar­ket. Af­ter beef­ing up the num­ber of reg­u­la­tors on staff, Chi­na’s FDA slashed re­view times to a frac­tion of what they had been. There’s been a con­tin­ued de­cline in the over­all num­ber of back­logged ap­pli­ca­tion, thanks to in­creased speed at the agency. In drug INDs alone, the Cen­ter for Drug Eval­u­a­tion han­dled 542 ap­pli­ca­tions and ap­proved 481 of them — among those, 399 cas­es (shared by 170 drugs) were for nov­el drugs.

On­col­o­gy and di­ges­tive drugs dom­i­nat­ed the group of nov­el drug INDs ap­proved last year. In bi­o­log­ics, on­col­o­gy al­so takes up the biggest chunk of INDs, with hema­tol­ogy emerg­ing as the run­ner-up.

Each IND took an av­er­age of 120 work­ing days to eval­u­ate, 1.09 times the pe­ri­od re­quired by law — a dras­tic im­prove­ment from, say, 2012, when records show that al­most half of the ap­pli­ca­tions would take longer than 400 days to process.

Ag­gres­sive hir­ing of new staff was like­ly a key fac­tor to speed­ing up the reg­u­la­to­ry op­er­a­tion. With new units spe­cial­iz­ing in clin­i­cal test­ing and da­ta man­age­ment, the CF­DA made 223 new hires, in­clud­ing two “chief sci­en­tists.”

The CDE al­so ramped up the pri­or­i­ty re­view sys­tem, which was launched in 2016. By their count, first rounds for INDs, NDAs and AN­DAs took an av­er­age of 39, 59 and 81 work­ing days once they were ac­cept­ed for pri­or­i­ty re­view.

By the end of 2017, 423 ap­pli­ca­tions of all sorts were in­clud­ed for pri­or­i­ty re­view, with 45% of that be­ing new drugs with clear clin­i­cal ben­e­fit (oth­er com­mon rea­sons in­clud­ed si­mul­ta­ne­ous ap­pli­ca­tion in the US/EU and first copy­cat). Rare dis­ease drugs took up 5% of the cas­es.

The CDE’s 110 pri­or­i­ty re­view ap­provals trans­lat­ed to 57 drugs, and 50 of those were ap­proved in 2017. Over­seas phar­mas won big: Re­gen­eron’s Eylea, Ab­b­Vie’ Hu­mi­ra, In­cyte’s Jakafi and Cel­gene’s Vi­daza (to be mar­ket­ed by part­ner BeiGene) were among those ap­proved through the pri­or­i­ty re­view track.

Giv­en the gov­ern­ment re­vamp an­nounced weeks ago, this would be the last re­port is­sued by a stand­alone CF­DA. But chang­ing its name to Chi­na Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion and go­ing un­der the purview of an um­brel­la mar­ket su­per­vi­sion agency like­ly won’t stop the reg­u­la­tors from build­ing an even more ag­gres­sive sys­tem.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.

The National Institutes of Health has again declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas and Pfizer’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi despite being invented at UCLA with grants from the US Army and NIH.

“Given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug,” NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News. The institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public,” an indication that there was not a pressing need for the US to act.