Making anti-cancer drugs affordable and effective

To Sun Piaoyang, chairman of Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, a leading manufacturer of antineoplastic drugs, and also a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress, the mission of China's top pharmaceutical companies is to provide effective medicines that ordinary people can afford.

China reported 3.929 million new cases of malignant tumors and 2.338 million cancer-related deaths in 2015, with annual healthcare expenditures surpassing 220 billion yuan. With tens of millions of Chinese families affected by cancer, Premier Li Keqiang said in the Government Work Report this year that China will take action in cancer prevention and treatment, promote preventive screening, provide early diagnosis and treatment, and achieve breakthroughs in cancer research to ease this pain on people's lives.

Sun said the state is providing more and more support to pharmaceutical companies. The central government has invested nearly 20 billion yuan in a special program to develop innovative drugs and also driven investment of nearly 200 billion yuan from regional governments into the sector, resulting in the production of 38 new Class I drugs. China has also stepped up reform on evaluation and approval of new medicines, giving the go-ahead to 18 new anti-cancer drugs in 2018, among which five were developed in the country. The time needed to approve new drugs has been slashed by half. More anti-cancer drugs have reduced prices through negotiations between the administration and pharmaceutical companies and are included on the country's medical insurance reimbursement list. In 2018, 17 cancer drugs widely used in tumor treatment were included in China's national basic healthcare system, resulting in an average price cut of 56.7 percent. By the end of the year, a total of 44,600 patients benefited from the move, which led to a 75 percent drop in personal expenditures after reimbursement from the medical insurance fund.

Research and development of domestic generic drugs is also on a fast track. Take Gleevec as example: the drug, used to treat leukemia, is sold at 23,000 yuan a bottle in China, but the domestic generic version costs only one-tenth of that. Chinese patients can now pay much less as the drug has been added to the medical insurance reimbursement list, making this effective drug more affordable. In 2018, China reported 169 institutes undertaking cancer clinical trials, among which 88 percent were domestic projects, far more than foreign-funded companies.