Advertisement

If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership. (optional)

ACS values your privacy. By submitting your information, you are gaining access to C&EN and subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We use the information you provide to make your reading experience better, and we will never sell your data to third party members.

ENJOY UNLIMITED ACCES TO C&EN

Business

Merck Plans R&D Center in China

Pharmaceuticals: Beijing will be U.S. firm’s R&D headquarters in Asia

by Jean-François Tremblay
December 12, 2011 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 89, Issue 50

[+]Enlarge
Credit: Newscom
China’s health care market offers big opportunities for Merck & Co.
Newscom photo of children being vaccinated in China.
Credit: Newscom
China’s health care market offers big opportunities for Merck & Co.

Merck & Co. will spend $1.5 billion on R&D in China over the next five years, with a big chunk of the cash going to build a facility in Beijing that will become the U.S. company’s R&D headquarters for Asia.

By 2014, Merck expects to complete the construction of R&D facilities in Beijing’s Wangjing Park with more than 500,000 sq ft of space. By then, Merck will have 600 people in Beijing working in drug discovery, translational research, clinical development, regulatory affairs, and management of outsourced research programs. The company expects to further expand its Beijing R&D facilities after 2014.

At a press conference in Beijing, Ruiping Dong, a Merck senior vice president in charge of R&D in emerging markets, said one of the goals of the new R&D center is to facilitate the approval of Merck products by Chinese regulators. Peter Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratories, added that Beijing was selected over Shanghai partly because it is the Chinese government’s decision center.

Merck has been conducting R&D in China for years. In 2005, it established a lab in Beijing that now employs 300 scientists who manage clinical data. Moreover, Merck is one of the major customers of China’s numerous contract research organizations, or CROs.

Because of its reliance on CROs, Merck’s R&D presence in China so far has been mostly “virtual,” notes Greg Scott, CEO of ChinaBio, a company that advises investors about China’s biotech sector. “Perhaps they have felt some pressure [from the Chinese government] to set up a brick-and-mortar R&D lab,” he says.

It is quite likely that Merck was offered attractive terms by Wangjing Park, an emerging research cluster that actively promotes itself to potential investors, Scott adds. “Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park is the most established location in China, but it is less aggressive in its promotion,” he says.

A few companies have already selected Beijing to conduct pharmaceutical R&D. Novo Nordisk set up an R&D center in the Chinese capital about 10 years ago. More recently, the oncology start-up BeiGene chose Beijing as its headquarters. Several of China’s top universities and government research institutes are in Beijing.

Advertisement

Article:

This article has been sent to the following recipient:

0 /1 FREE ARTICLES LEFT THIS MONTH Remaining
Chemistry matters. Join us to get the news you need.