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July 5, 2017 12:47 pm JST
Eisai to seek China's approval for brand-new cancer drug
Regulation reform gives drugmakers reason to tap huge market early
NATSUKI YAMAMOTO, Nikkei staff writer
Eisai's Lenvima is already available for treating certain types of thyroid and kidney cancer.
TOKYO -- Eisai intends to apply in China as soon as October for marketing approval for its new liver cancer drug Lenvima, which the company only just submitted in Japan in June and will submit in Western nations later this month.
Including China among the first target markets for a new drug is a first for Eisai and a rarity among foreign drug companies because of the regulatory hurdles there. But China appears ready to change its rules on the use of multiregional clinical data, and that has the drug companies speeding up their efforts to tap into the huge and growing Chinese market.
Eisai is developing Lenvima for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma, which accounts for some 80% of the 800,000 global cases of liver cancer each year and is concentrated in Asia, home to four out of five patients with this type.
Eisai conducted multiregional phase III clinical trials on Lenvima on 954 subjects, including 100 from China. It will use that data when submitting the drug to the Chinese regulators for approval.
Up until now, most drugs submitted for marketing approval in China by multinational drug companies have been accompanied by data from clinical trials conducted inside China. That is because the only way to use data from multiregional trials has been to apply ahead of time for an exemption, which takes nearly 20 months to receive.
But now China is considering doing away with the exemption requirement and letting drug companies use the data from their multiregional trials, provided that the trials include a certain number of Chinese patients. Eisai is acting on the assumption that the new policy will soon come into effect.
China's drug market was worth an estimated 12.9 trillion yen ($114 billion) in 2016, about 20% more than Japan's, and with rising incomes fueling the demand for new medications, the market could approach 19 trillion yen by 2021, according to a forecast by market research firm by QuintilesIMS.
Japan's pharmaceutical companies are now actively working to introduce products into this growth market. Astellas Pharma has applied in China for approval to market its prostate cancer drug Xtandi, and Takeda Pharmaceutical is busy with phase III clinical trials on Azilva to treat high blood pressure and on Takecab for acid-related diseases, including gastric ulcers and acid reflux.
Because of the regulatory hurdles, pharmaceutical companies have tended to wait to introduce drugs in China until after the products have demonstrated some success in other markets.
But given the size of the Chinese market, drugmakers are expected to act to release product simultaneously in China, Japan and the West in order to capture as much business as possible.
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