China building trust in drive to innovate
Market opportunities in China are staggering, yet it was a question of trust that dominated the Q&A period following the BIO-Europe Spring® panel discussion “Why China Should be Factored into a Company’s Development and Commercialization Strategy.”
The central point of several members of the audience was to ask, “If I believe China can match quality standards of the West, how can I be sure my asset will not be stolen?”
“Because today China recognizes that it has a lot to lose by playing with intellectual property, and that there is more to be gained by respecting conventions,” replied Michael Heerde, director for business development at Bayer Healthcare Company China, which last year generated USD 580 million in sales.
“There are no independent courts in China,” he said, “and the government has stepped in where there were errors in a patent to decide in favor of the patent holder,” he said.
“The risk to intellectual property is an old story,” he continued. “Yes, it used to be a problem and there is a lot of older anecdotal evidence, but I personally do not believe that this is any longer a China-specific issue.”
“Conditions for intellectual property in China are not worse that any other market where we all face greater risks the closer we get to commercialization,” he concluded.
The case for revisiting opinions about China was delivered by the moderator for the session, Ian Wisenberg, senior Vice President with ChinaBio LLC, who described the country’s drive to innovate with an 22 percent increase in patent applications of its own in 2008.
“This increase in innovation is being fueled by government funding,” he said, demonstrating a will to enforce the intellectual property of others in the interest of receiving equal recognition for emerging Chinese assets.
Panelist Yuwen Liu could speak of the government’s position as a Vice President with the state-backed Suzhou Ventures Group.
“There is a tendency to hear of China’s investment in infrastructure and immediately think of highways and new office park facilities,” she said.
Yet the government in recent years has put an equally heavy investment into what she called “soft infrastructure,” or people, to build a stronger talent pool to support its ambitions to convert the “Made in China” label to “Created in China.”
The government is aggressively acting to “fill in the blank spaces in the value chain toward a full capability for discovery to manufacturing in life sciences,” she said.
To the question of how to enter China, session chair Wisenberg recommended starting with one of the panel members, Liu representing state-sponsored connections, then passing over to Heerde representing the interests and experience of big pharma, and finally Richard Soll, the senior Vice President for Integrated Services with WuXi AppTec, representing a contract resource organization.
He also encouraged participants to consider the opportunity of attending the upcoming ChinaBio® Partnering Forum, June 23–24 in Suzhou, China.
The second year for this highly successful event ChinaBio Partnering Forum brings together CEOs, business development and licensing executives from biotech and pharma companies, contract research and manufacturing organizations, venture capital firms and other life science related companies from around the world.
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