The great medicines migration - How China took control of key global pharmaceutical supplies

Nikkei Asia ^

[FarCenter]

Put simply, an API is a component of a drug that impacts health -- for example, suppressing a disease or its symptoms. APIs are the result of integrating substances known as key starting materials, or KSMs, and intermediates. Few pharmaceutical companies handle the whole process, from KSM to finished drug. Most import at least some materials, especially generic drug makers. And most roads lead to China.

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The U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency estimated in 2017 that China alone was producing about 40% of all APIs.

Its actual influence may reach even farther.

This reporter experienced the Chinese medicine connection firsthand after suffering from a severe stomachache. A doctor diagnosed bacterial gastroenteritis and issued prescriptions, including a generic antibiotic called levofloxacin. The drug’s API came from three possible sources, one from China and two from Japan. However, it turned out both Japanese producers imported the pre-purified API from China.

China has an advantage in “the low-cost and off-patent APIs” like antibiotics or vitamins because production costs are lower there than in Western nations. The country’s large share of APIs looks even greater if one follows the trail upstream to KSMs, which are often simple yet versatile chemical substances produced in bulk.

Even India, another pharmaceutical giant often considered to be an alternative to China, depends heavily on Chinese supplies. According to the European Commission, India accounts for about 20% of global generic drug demand by volume, but it imports about 70% of the APIs from China. For some drugs, such as the painkilling and anti-inflammatory ibuprofen, India procures the vast majority of the APIs from China, according to the Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council of India (Pharmexcil). Moreover, while India is one of the biggest API exporters, many KSMs and intermediates of those APIs come from China.

[DoughtyOne]

Here China. Here's our complete stock of nooses.
Please use them wisely.

Author unknown...

[MurrietaMadman]

With a little help from their friends...

https://www.rockefeller.edu/our-scientists/heads-of-laboratories/

https://ulib.iupui.edu/wmicproject/node/455

As Mary Brown Bullock writes in An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College, the dedication of the PUMC in 1921 highlighted the social and political outlook of the Rockefeller philanthropists as they offered Western science and medicine to the leaders of China.(32) The Archive Center holds several sources on the dedication, including film footage of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s trip to China; correspondence documenting the trip; and a published volume titled Addresses and Papers; Dedication Ceremonies and Medical Conference; Peking Union Medical College; September 15-21, 1921 (Peking, China, 1922). The volume includes addresses at the dedication and detailed accounts of clinical work and laboratory and epidemiological research at the PUMC.