Af­ter a makeover and hir­ing spree, Chi­na's drug agency is romp­ing and stomp­ing on new re­views and ap­provals

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.

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