Ahead of next week’s CPHI Japan 2023 (19-21 April), one keynote speaker – Ian Haydock, editor-in-chief, insights, Asia-Pacific at Citeline – predicts that the continued rise of biopharma innovation in China is the big macro trend in the APAC region that could potentially lead to shifts in outsourcing and manufacturing strategies regionally.
Key insights:
- Oncology remains the dominant category in therapeutic focus, overall at 41%, but rare diseases at 19.5% and neurology at 13.5% are also prominent.
- More than 60% of Japanese companies state their potential partners are ‘approaching them much earlier than before’ according to the CPHI data.
- The shifts in the sites of global biopharma innovation could also create new distribution and regional manufacturing hubs.
“Historically, we have seen a dual strategy of focusing on China and the US for emerging innovators in China. However, a series of recent setbacks with approvals in the US, some linked to insufficient clinical data from US populations, has started to bring a shift. Over the next few years, we are likely to see some of these China-based innovators increasingly targeting other markets such as Southeast Asia and Japan as larger priorities – as the likely challenges around representative patient data are far lower,” said Haydock.