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San Francisco Business Times:
Bridging the biopharmaceutical gap with a new Chinese Lab
by Daniel S. Levine November 22nd 2005
A Menlo Park-based drug research company is opening a facility in Beijing next month, hoping to bring the cost benefits of outsourcing to the biopharmaceutical industry.
Fledgling Bridge Pharmaceutical Inc., will open the 100,000-square-foot facility in Beijing's Zhong-guancun Life Science Park. The facility, designed from the ground up to meet U.S. regulatory standards for lab practice and animal testing, will be the first facility in China that meets those standards. It promises to provide western biopharmaceutical companies the benefits of the lower cost of research in China, while delivering the rigorous data quality needed to pass muster with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European regulators.
Already, through contract relationships, Bridge has been able to provide preclinical research for clients that led earlier this year to two drug candidates winning FDA clearances to begin human clinical trials.
With the cost of bringing a drug from discovery to the market in excess of $1 billion, the pharmaceutical industry is wrestling with new ways to cut costs. Industry watchers said drug company valuations have changed dramatically during the past decade. They are now finding, as TPG Ventures Managing Director Geoffrey Duyk said, that they must "run themselves as real businesses."
"The pharmaceutical industry is one of the last vertically integrated industries and it's slowly becoming more horizontally integrated... Certainly going offshore for selected aspects of the process is inevitable," Mr. Duyk said. "It's a logical next step. What's interesting about the Bridge model is that they are linking existing know-how in CRO businesses to try to build something on an international platform."
Similarly, the cost of primates in mainland China, which supplies about 80 percent of the primates used in preclinical testing of drugs, is about one-fifth the cost in the United States. Bridge said it is able to get its primates through a U.S. franchise in China that provides it with high-quality animals that are genetically identical to those supplied by the company in the United States.
DANIEL S. LEVINE covers biotechnology for the San Francisco Business Times, an affiliated publication.
About Pharmaron
Founded in 2003, Pharmaron is a leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug R&D CRO, with operations in China and the United States. Clients include pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic and government organizations. As a research-driven and customer-focused company, Pharmaron provides a broad, integrated portfolio of laboratory and manufacturing services from drug discovery to IND submission. These services are designed to help its global partners improve the success of research and shorten the time of development cost effectively in discovering and developing drugs. For more information about Pharmaron, please visit http://www.pharmaron.com.
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