Chinese pharmaceutical companies are stepping up their push into the US generic drugs market with the number of approvals for copycat medicines almost doubling last year.
In 2017, Chinese drugmakers won US Food and Drug Administration approval for 38 generic drugs, cheaper versions of treatments for which patents have expired, up from 22 a year earlier. This month, Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, China’s largest pharmaceutical company with a $35bn market capitalisation, became the latest to win approval for its generic of anaesthetic desflurane.
The number of approvals is small in comparison to India — the world’s largest exporter of generic drugs with $16.4bn of offshore sales in 2016 — which last year accounted for 300 of the 927 generic drugs granted US approval. But the first China-made generic drug was granted US approval in 2007, a decade after India.