China Allows Pharmaceutical Technologies to Be Sold Freely     

China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) recently promulgated the "Administrative Regulation for the Registration of Drug Technology License". Drug technologies will be allowed to be licensed and transferred freely within the domestic pharmaceutical industry.
   The implementation of this regulation can effectively cut the quantity of drug approval documents. After the transfer of a drug's production technology is approved, its original approval document code will be written off to prevent drug producers from applying for new drug approval document codes by simply changing the formulation of the drug or imitating the drug. This can radically eliminate the low-level duplication of drugs.
   It is known that over half of drug approval document codes are unused and that the frequently used approval document codes account for less than one fourth of the total. On the one hand, there are a large number of unused approval document codes, but on the other hand, a lot of drug manufacturers apply for new ones. The idleness of approval document codes can cause the idleness of pharmaceutical technologies. This not only is a waste of social resources but also is very unfavorable to the supervision of pharmaceutical production, the re-evaluation of marketed drugs and the monitoring of adverse reactions of drugs.
    After the regulation takes effect, the management of drug varieties will turn from "a static state" into "a dynamic state". This will be conducive to the healthy development of the pharmaceutical industry.