China "will compete with other Asian countries in CRO market within five years"

Currently, about one hundred contract research organizations are operating in China, but within five years this sector of the pharmaceutical industry will offer fierce competition to its counterparts in other Asian countries like India, according to Michael Chu, president of life sciences consulting firm AsiaBizCo. He believes that large international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have overcome concerns about data security and intellectual property protection in China, traditionally a barrier to outsourcing this type of work, but now outweighed by the substantially lower costs.

Jonathan Wang, general manager of the Burrill Greater China Group, stated: "researchers often work with chemical libraries to find potentially useful compounds, but long before a drug reaches the stage where trials test its safety and efficacy in humans, the compounds are usually tested on animals. Meanwhile, the new drugs are constantly being modified, for example, to find the correct dosage, and an increasing amount of this preclinical work is carried out in China. It would cost a US company $250,000-$300,000 annually to employ a full-time PhD level chemist, whereas for a similar level chemist in China this is about $30,000. Overall, the cost of preclinical work in China averages about half that of the USA."

Still no direct route to human testing