Paper on Orphan Drug Development in China Published
/Alice Cheng and Zhi Xie of the Rare Genomics Institute have published a open-access paper, "Challenges in orphan drug development and regulatory policy" in the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases.
Cheng and Xie's paper compares orphan drug development and regulatory policy in China and the US. They find that due to political, economic, and cultural differences, China cannot simply base its policies on the American model. China's public healthcare system has the opportunity to take advantage of available data to create aggregated databases for diseases and genomic information, assisting epidemiology research.
The authors advocate for the five suggestions proposed by the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference of 2009:
- Establish a definition for rare diseases.
- Develop an orphan drug reimbursement system.
- Propose a clear and simple approval pathway for imported orphan drugs.
- Promte rare disease research through policy.
- Develop government-supported programs for rare disease patients.
Read the full paper from the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases.