On November 19, 2020, the 4th emtech china Global Emerging Technology Summit was held in Xiangcheng District, Suzhou. As one of the world's most prestigious events to deeply interpret global technology trends with authoritative insights, the emtech series of summits of MIT Technology Review has become the world's most influential technology conference vane. This year, emtech china 2020 will continue to take the combination of technology and business as the main line, and dozens of the world's top scientists, academicians at home and abroad, business leaders, and science and technology elites will come to the scene to discuss the development status of emerging technologies and their huge impact on human society. In addition, the 2020 list of "50 Smart Companies" of MIT Technology Review was also released at the scene.
At the meeting, Liu Jian, senior vice president of BeiGene and head of biopharmaceuticals, shared the keynote speech of "China's Biomedical Industry Road" at the scene.
The following is a transcript of the speech after compilation:
Good afternoon and thank you very much emtech for giving us this opportunity today to talk about some of BeiGene's thoughts and views on biopharmaceutical innovation in China.
The spread of the new crown epidemic in 2020 poses a relatively large challenge to human society, although it has caused a lot of pain, but on the other hand, it has also witnessed the tenacious and tenacious side of human beings, especially in China, the medical innovation to fight the epidemic goes hand in hand with developed countries, within a month we invented diagnostic reagents, and more than 10 vaccines entered phase III clinical trials in 10 months, which is actually comparable to the world's top countries and developed countries.
You can recall, why did China achieve this speed? My own view is that 2015 was a watershed.
In 2015, China's policy made a series of reforms, the national "Opinions on Reforming the Review and Approval System for Pharmaceutical Medical Devices" opened the curtain on the reform of the national drug review and approval system, especially the research and development supervision of drugs has undergone fundamental changes, before this, the innovation of China's pharmaceutical industry was mainly the production of generic drugs.
From 2018 to 2019, more than 40 new drugs can be approved each year, and hundreds of products have been approved, and the pace of development is quite fast. Why is China's biopharmaceuticals developing rapidly? I personally think there are three main factors:
First, policy factors. Between 2015 and 2017, the state issued four core documents to promote the MAH (drug marketing authorization holder) system, join the ICH (International Coordination Conference on Human Drug Registration Technology) two key tasks, in 2019 approved a total of 60 new drugs for the first time in China, the number of new drugs approved that year exceeded the United States, these factors directly led to the development of local new drug research and development;
Second, the gathering of talents. Driven by the policy dividend, China's new drug research and innovation capabilities and talent reserves have been rapidly constructed, not only in China to cultivate a large number of clinical and R & D personnel, but also to attract a large number of high-end talents from foreign companies to flow to China;
Third, the gathering of capital. A large amount of domestic and foreign capital has poured into the biomedical industry, boosting the rise of Innovation in China. In 2019, the financing amount of the medical and health industry reached 60.28 billion yuan, and biomedicine became the hottest area for medical and health investment and financing. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the Shanghai Stock Exchange have provided new financing channels for biotechnology companies, with 16 biotechnology companies listed on the Hong Kong stock market and a total market capitalization of more than US$170 billion.
Driven by these factors, how has China's pharmaceutical industry changed? What are the features? Let me briefly explain.
First, China's innovation is a spurt and the speed is quite fast; second, the aggregation of capital, whether it is China's local capital or global capital gathering, is a large number of redundancies; third, China's biopharmaceutical innovation is now not only developing locally, but also developing in conjunction with foreign companies, keeping pace with it.
But China's pharmaceuticals are not smooth sailing, which is also the focus of my talk today, China's biopharmaceuticals have two main challenges:
The first is that our originality is not enough, many innovative drugs in Chinese pharmaceuticals come out, in fact, they are basically imitating foreign pharmaceutical models, and there is a lack of new targets in basic research, and a lack of differentiated innovation;
The second is the backwardness of China's industrialization, and the backwardness of industrialization is manifested in two aspects, one is that the production capacity is not enough, and the other is that the production technology is backward and the degree of domestic production is extremely low.
This phenomenon has become more and more obvious after the emergence of the new crown epidemic, including our company's pd-1 products can treat more than 20 kinds of cancer, the effect is quite good, due to the requirements of the new crown epidemic for biopharmaceuticals, we can hardly find additional production capacity in China. Moreover, the core technology of general biopharmaceuticals is invented in the West, the result is that our production technology is backward, many production technology to match the raw materials, materials, excipients must rely on foreign imports, when I talk to friends, I found that many companies have 70% or even 80% of raw materials imported from abroad. With the development of the epidemic, this phenomenon has become more and more prominent, and the cycle of bringing products abroad to China is quite long, which also leads to a long production cycle and release cycle of our products.
Industrialization improvement is mainly two processes, one is the research and development of production processes, how to turn the concepts that come to mind of scientists into visible, touchable, and quantifiable production processes, in addition to the process of production and manufacturing, that is, production capacity.
In this context, what is BeiGene doing? We have identified two-legged walking measures, the first leg, is to establish a strong partnership with the world's best quality, the most powerful production outsourcers, in the absence of their own production capacity, relying on their strength to produce the products we need, in addition, we have built two global production bases, one in Suzhou, one in Guangzhou, the production base in Suzhou mainly focuses on the production of chemical small molecule drugs, in the Production Base in Guangzhou to do the production of biological macromolecular drugs.
Our project in Guangzhou has invested 2.3 billion yuan, and its goal is to build a world-class production base, in addition to ensuring its own supply chain, our company has a strong desire to pull down the price of the best drugs in China.
The accessibility of drugs is limited, especially the accessibility of world-class drugs is very poor, a year often need hundreds of thousands of drug costs, this price most people can not afford, our goal is to pull down the price of this drug, pull down the very important link also have production capacity, if there is no own factory, no superb technology can not produce this drug, the supply depends on the supply of large foreign companies.
Our second goal is to bring the good medicines we make not only to China, but also to foreign countries. Therefore, the production base is based on the use of the world's highest quality standards, our products to go abroad, we not only to China's treatment standards as a reference, but also with reference to European, American standards, at any time as long as there is a need, our products can be in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan and other places in the world to carry out clinical trials or commercial sales.
From the perspective of technology trends, tomorrow must be intelligent, to achieve Industry 4.0 completely intelligent management of factory capabilities, today we do biopharmaceuticals is a relatively advanced, highly technical work, but if we use intelligent technical thinking for research and development, will make the original very complex process become relatively simple.
BeiGene's goal is to go abroad and make high-end drugs universally available to the world, thank you.
