China has been promoting protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the pharmaceutical sector, but it needs more efforts in the field, a senior official of the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) said in Beijing Tuesday.

Zhang Jingli, deputy director of SFDA, made the remarks at a pharmaceutical IPR summit forum Tuesday. China has authorized administrative protection to 155 IPR applicants from 12 foreign countries, and has added data safeguarding content to its regulations for supervision and administration of medicines, he said.

To abide by its commitment on entry to the World Trade Oorganization, China has abolished the administrative protection for new medicines, Zhang said.

However, Zhang pointed out that although Chinese pharmaceutical businesses have boosted their production capacity to world levels, the whole industry is still weak in innovation.

Statistics from SFDA show that the total output value of China's pharmaceutical industry reached 449.6 billion yuan (54.4 billion US dollars) in 2004, approximately 70 times of that of 1980. But in terms of

market shares the more than 6000 domestic drug makers were equal only to that of the world second-largest drug maker GlaxoSmithKline.

Zhang Qingkui, of the State Intellectual Property Office, cited the lack of investment in research and development and independent IPRs as a major obstacle to the growth of Chinese medicine businesses.

Statistics show that large foreign multinationals invested about 15 to 20 percent of their sales revenues into developing new medicines. In comparison, Chinese medicine businesses only input one percent.

Under the planned economy system in the past, Chinese medicine businesses highly depended on imitation, and they were under no pressure and had not enough capability for innovation due to the lack of market awareness. About one third of the state-owned pharmaceutical businesses had a deficit.

However, according to relevant WTO rules, developers of pharmaceuticals under patent protection would charge huge indemnities on imitations. Zhang said that after China's entry into WTO, China has seen a steady growth of patent applications by Chinese medicine businesses and China's enhanced IPR protection efforts have helped the medicine businesses improve their awareness of IPR protection.

"Chinese businesses are entering a new phase of 'combination of copying and creating' after 'completely copying'," Zhang said. "For Chinese businesses that have a short history, to make improvements of the products or manufacturing processes of others is an acceptable practice."

He suggested the Chinese government should promote the awareness of the public and businesses for IPR innovation and protection so as to enhance the creativity of the whole industry.

Source: Xinhua