Guangzhou wooing international biotech players with incentives
February 12, 2019 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, is providing incentives to attract big international biotech players to develop new drugs. GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of American conglomerate General Electric that focuses on medical imaging and diagnostics equipment and bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, has already been attracted by the government incentives. GE is building its first Asia biotech campus – covering 350,000 square meters and requiring CNY800 million of investment – in the Sino-Singapore Knowledge City, some 35 kilometers northeast of downtown Guangzhou.
The “city” – a joint development project between Guangdong and Singapore in an area one-ninth the land area of Hong Kong – aims to house half a million people and foster high-tech industrial clusters in the high-growth emerging fields of information technology, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, clean energy and advanced industrial materials. GE will join the Guangzhou government and biotech industry players to fund the construction of several “KUBio” modular bio-pharmaceutical factories, which it says will shorten the completion time from 30 months to 18 months, cut construction cost by half, and quicken drugs commercialization. Under an investment intent agreement signed in December, one KUBio modular factory will be built for Basel, Switzerland-based Lonza, a 121 year-old company and one of the world’s biggest suppliers of custom development and manufacturing services to drug developers.
Guanghzhou’s push comes as China has emerged as the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical market, with Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou key centers of drug development. The country now has 67 biopharmaceutical industrial parks, according to healthcare database compiler hsmap.com, though many are lacking in innovation capabilities. Three of Guangzhou’s biggest competitors are: Beijing’s 2.5 sq km Zhongguancun Life Science Park, set up 18 years ago, whose 60-plus tenants include the National institute of Biological Sciences, Tsinghua University-affiliated genomic and diagnostics kits developer Capital Bio, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and U.S. biotech firm Sanofi Genzyme; Shanghai’s 3 sq km Zhangjiang Biomedical Industry Base established in 1996 that houses more than 400 biopharmaceutical firms; and Suzhou Industry Park’s BioBay that opened in 2007 and is home to more than 400 start-ups.
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