China to Bring First Home-Made Anti-HIV Drug to the Market
Dou Shicong
(Yicai Global) July 16 — China’s drug regulator has approved the country’s first domestically developed anti-HIV medicine.
Frontier Biotechnologies got the green light from the China Food and Drug Administration to bring the Nanjing-based firm’s independently developed Albuvirtide medicine to the market, state broadcaster China Central Television reported yesterday.
Albuvirtide only needs to be injected once a week and is more effective and safer than the earlier widely used options, which are injected twice a day and cause severe side effects, said Zhao Jianzhong, an expert from the CFDA.
China had some 747,000 AIDS patients as of last Sept. Since 2004, the country began to provide such patients with free drugs which were mostly domestically made generic medicine.
China will bring drugs that may already be launched in global markets into the domestic market as soon as possible to satisfy the needs of Chinese patients, said Wang Tao, chief reviewer from the Center for Drug Evaluation.
Editor: Emmi Laine
