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January 9, 2015

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Finding a cure to expensive cancer medicines

By Xu Wenwen | January 9, 2015, Friday | Print Edition

PATHOLOGIST Ding Lieming recalls a day back in 2003. He says it was just a regular day, yet he managed to cause a stir while at the US Consulate General in Shanghai.

After waiting in line for a long time, he remembers taking a couple of steps to the window and telling the clerk, “I want to cancel my green card.”

“People took notice right away,” Ding says. “People in line craned their necks to see what this middle-aged guy looked like because most of them there were doing the opposite, they were applying for a green card.”

Ding, a native of Shengzhou, a small coastal city in Zhejiang Province, has a PhD in medicine from the University of Arkansas and worked as a pathologist in the US.

But in 2002, Ding and several doctors from China invented a compound that could curb epidermal growth factor. He says this changed his life and turned his focus back to China. Of course, they could have stayed in the US and continued their research into turning the compound into an anti-cancer drug while looking for an investor and making millions of dollars. They had a different idea.

“The American dream is not my end destination,” he says.

“Our goal was to make an anti-cancer drug that Chinese patients can afford.”

In 2003, he and his team returned to China with the ambition of “serving Chinese people.”

Ding says the following year he established Betapharma in Yuhang, Hangzhou. Within a decade he and his colleagues have developed the drug Conmana (Icotinib) for non-small-cell lung cancer. It costs about a quarter of medicines with similar efficacy.

He says they faced numerous challenges getting the drug to market including the loss of their main overseas investor in 2008 during the global financial crisis. Ding says the Yuhang government provided Betapharma with a 15-million-yuan (US$2.41 million) loan to keep the company afloat.

The medical journal The Lancet Oncology has referred to the drug as “a perfect test case for kick-starting the Chinese anti-cancer drug industry” when it published Conmana’s clinical trial results.

Nearly 40,000 patients have taken Conmana for treatment, and the disease control rate (DCR) has reached 80 percent, while the objective response rate (ORR) is 30 percent, said the company.

It is China’s first pill for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer. Before it hit the market in 2011, only imported medicines such as Gefitinib and Erlotinib were available. Both cost more than 500 yuan a day while Conmana costs 130 yuan per day.

The development cost of Conmana was between US$20 million and US$30 million, while anti-cancer drugs in the West can cost hundreds of millions of US dollars to develop, Ding says.

Betapharma has even given the drug to patients for free after they have taken it for six months. More than 15,000 patients have received free medicine as of the end of last year. The company says it actually gave out more free pills than it sold in 2014.

“Before we released the product, many people suggested a price equal to other anti-cancer drugs because patients will think the pill isn’t good if it’s not expensive,” Ding says. “But we insisted on taking the risk of setting a low price out of consideration for patients.”

Ironically, the price initially was not “attractive.” Ding says doctors doubted the drug’s efficacy and hesitated to buy the “cheap” medicine.

Ding even says the director of one domestic hospital took a quick look at his business card and only said: “I never work with Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises.”

According to Ding, Betapharma was losing money, lots of money. A multinational firm in the industry stepped in and offered US$250 million for the drug. Ding says he refused.

“The pill is like our baby, even though we already owed the bank hundreds of millions of yuan, we will not sell it,” Ding says.

The article in Lancet has proven to be the turning point. After it was published, Chinese hospitals started ordering Conmana.

Ding says he and his team are also developing new drugs targeting other cancers, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

Since the drug has been on the market, the company has received many letters, calls and visits from patients thanking them.

“We initially intended to make anti-cancer drugs that Chinese people can afford and clinical results prove it works,” Ding says. “It was a good decision to return home.”

Hangzhou


 

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