Bio-medicine: Economic Hope for North China City

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, October 01, 2002

Bio-medicine: Economic Hope for North China City

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The North China Pharmaceutical Group Corporation (NCPC), China's leading maker of chemical pharmaceuticals based in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province, has started negotiating export sales of medicines developed with gene technology.

Guo Ruihui, deputy general manager of the NCPC GeneTech Biotechnology Development Company, said it was universally acknowledged that biological medicine had a host of advantages over conventional chemical pharmaceuticals or traditional Chinese medicine, including lower dosages and fewer side effects.

"The industry of biological pharmaceuticals has great potentialand will be turned into a new generator of economic growth," said Guo, who acknowledged that other countries were cautious about applying gene technology to medical treatment.

The four biological pharmaceuticals now produced by NCPC have been only used as auxiliary medicines, according to Guo. NCPC's biological medicines were already exported to other countries, including Argentina, the Philippines, Brazil and India.

Founded in the 1950s, NCPC is also famous for making antibiotics and other Western medicines and is one of the country's most modern pharmaceutical manufacturers.

NCPC is just one of the 289 medicine production enterprises based in Shijiazhuang, where there are some than 300 retail outlets for pharmaceuticals. More than 200,000 people are employedin the city's pharmaceutical business.

Shijiazhuang Mayor Zang Jianye has pledged to promote faster development by expanding the city's pharmaceutical industry.

To this end, the city of Shijiazhuang has worked out plans to build itself into a "capital of medicine", said the mayor, who said his city had unique conditions for planting medicinal herbs, producing and processing medicines, as well as distribution.

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