CCTV News: The healthy growth of children is related to every family, and children's medication has always been a topic of great concern to everyone. There are nearly 250 million children on the mainland, but this is a shortage of medicines for children. In recent years, the state has continuously increased its measures to meet the drug needs of children.
Children have relatively few medication options and the risk of blind medication is high
Children are quite different from adults in terms of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, etc., and have special characteristics in terms of dosage, dosage form, taste and so on. Therefore, compared with adult medication, there are relatively few options for children.
Yang Zhimin, deputy director of the Center for Drug Evaluation of the State Food and Drug Administration: Many of our drug research and development are suitable for adult use, so they are tablets and capsules. School-age children, infants, especially young babies, they can only rely on the drug to break, and then the dose depends on guessing. Safe and effective application to children poses a very big threat.
Encourage enterprises to develop children's drugs and open a green channel for declaration
Due to the long R&D cycle of children's new drugs and the relatively complex process, pharmaceutical companies are not highly motivated to produce. In order to encourage R&D and innovation in children's medication, the State Food and Drug Administration has opened a green channel for children's drug declaration, arranged special personnel to supervise the progress of the review task, and accelerated the review of children's medication throughout the process.
Yang Zhimin, Deputy Director of the Drug Evaluation Center of the State Food and Drug Administration: For these products that are urgently needed clinically and have great clinical value, we adopt advanced services, actively support, and include them in our priority review and approval channels to accelerate their marketing.
According to data released by the State Food and Drug Administration on May 31, from January to May this year, 34 children's drugs have been approved for marketing, exceeding the same period last year. It covers rare diseases in children, common diseases in children, and critical diseases in children. In the past three years (2019-2022), a total of 158 clinically urgent pediatric drugs have been approved for marketing.
Source: CCTV