Chinese-made new drugs big hit overseas

"I see there are a lot of companies in China that have big potential to develop global-level new drugs. For example, the number of drugs the country is running for clinical trials is massively bigger than other countries in Asia," said Chris Shim, general manager for Asia R&D and quality at US cloud-based pharmaceutical software company Veeva Systems.

With its enormous domestic market size, sufficient talent supply and large number of biotech and biopharma players, China's pharmaceutical industry is endowed with great potential to witness an increasing number of global-level innovative drugmakers, Shim said.

He added that in order to better adapt to local market conditions during their global outreach, Chinese companies are setting up concise strategies based on different market compliance issues and business performances, with a focus on the usage of cutting-edge technologies such as cloud platforms and artificial intelligence.

"Take cooperation ecosystem, for example. If Chinese companies want to manage different partners and patient dynamics abroad, they'll have to manage all the data and solutions across different countries, where lie cultural and regulatory differences and other kinds of complexities," he said, adding that digitalization can facilitate cross-regional communication and operation process to a large extent.

Shim's view is echoed by Yang Bin, clinical operations vice-president at Hutchmed, "The digitalization of overseas data collection, analysis and management ensures the timeliness of our data processing and analysis. For example, clinical data might contain some anomalies, but through a comprehensive digital management system, we can promptly detect and address these issues, ensuring the overall quality of the experiments.

"It can be said that the success of approvals in the US and Europe markets can't be separated from the application of a fully digitalized system."

In addition, Shim mentioned the role of AI in facilitating the going-global process.

"AI is helping people improve their productivity by eliminating routine jobs. For example, the documentation process of clinical trials can involve a lot of human work of writing, uploading, scanning and analyzing, but now all of them can be done by AI by simply taking a picture and AI will take care of the rest. AI is going to be the key differentiator for industry players," he said.