Asia-Pacific The latest from Southeast Asian pharma, including soaring output in Singapore, tax breaks for research in Indonesia, Thai firm Factorytalk’s UK expansion, and the potential for a Russian COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing facility in the Philippines.   Singapore Factory Output Surges At Fastest Pace In Nine Years On Pharma Boost (Business…

Global Toshio Fujimoto, MBA, MD of Japan’s Shonan Health Innovation Park highlights key takeaways from the BIOJapan 2020 conference on why San Diego offers a good example of what it takes to be a leader in the innovative life science sector.   Over the past two decades, drug discovery has undergone…

UK When the European Medicines Agency (EMA) relocated from London to Amsterdam after the UK announced its decision to leave the European Union, some analysts feared that Britain could become left behind in terms of alignment with the world’s top regulatory bodies. Perhaps cognizant of this, the UK regulatory agency for…

China RemeGen, a low-profile Chinese biotech company based in Yantai city in the coastal Shandong province, around nine hours by train from the bustling biopharma hub of Shanghai, just made history by becoming the largest biotech IPO to date globally in 2020. It is also one of the biggest IPOs of…

Global COVID-19 has drawn global attention to the sorry state of funding and R&D investment in vaccine development and pandemic prevention, but other previously neglected areas of health research are also now entering the spotlight. One of these underfunded areas is mental health and neurological disorders, leading a global group of…

China A roundup of the latest from Chinese pharma, including Green Valley’s upcoming US trial for an Alzheimer’s drug inspired by algae; Samsung Biologics expansion in China; Fosun Pharma’s halt to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine; and CAR-T biotech JW Therapeutics raising USD 300m in its IPO on the Hong…

USA In his latest piece on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) drug Aducanumab’s winding journey to market, Dr Neil Cashman looks forward to the US FDA Advisory Committee’s meeting on November 6 2020, what it means for that Aducanumab, and the impact on next-generation AD treatments.   November 6 could prove to be…

Global Dr Ann Aerts, head of the Novartis Foundation, highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has thrust artificial intelligence in healthcare into the limelight, and makes three bold predictions for the future of the field, especially in emerging countries.   As a true believer in the power of technology to transform health,…

China While cell and gene therapies are all the rage now, a little known fact is that the world’s first approved gene therapy actually came from a Chinese company – in 2003! Gendicine® was a gene therapy for the treatment of haemophilia B. While China mostly lost the advantage of that…

USA Market access and pricing expert Barbara Jaszewski outlines the issues inherent in the USA importing drugs from Canada and why such proposals retain political capital despite massive and proven flaws.   Drug importation is a curious “zombie” proposal that never seems to die Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have one…

USA Stephen J. Ubl, president and CEO of PhRMA, outlines the unprecedented collaboration and speed with which the biopharmaceutical industry has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the solutions that PhRMA is proposing to lower patient costs while protecting innovation and access.   We know that our innovation and our collaboration…

Turkey When Abdi Ibrahim acquired a 28.5 percent stake in Swiss biotech OM Pharma in September 2020, it represented a historic moment for Turkey’s pharma industry; the first time a Turkish firm had ever taken part in the management of a European company.   With this partnership agreement, the long trend…