Government Backs Drug Development to Counter FTA
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
The government plans to double its spending on the development of new drugs, as part of follow-up measures to the free trade agreement (FTA) signed with the United States.
The Ministry of Science and Technology said Tuesday that it plans to earmark 50 billion won for animal and clinical testing of new drugs in 2008, up from 31.1 billion won last year.
``We were spending about 400 million won on testing each new substance that had the potential to be used as a drug, just a tenth of that of international developers,'' Vice Science Minister Park Jong-koo said.
``Consequently, we are looking to increase the investment-per-substance to one to two billion won. A budget of 50 billion won is necessary for this,'' he added.
Through the increased backing, Park predicted that a new drug will be developed every year from 2016, which will earn the nation more than one trillion won annually.
``In addition, we aim to beef up efforts to find new substances, the building blocks of brand-new medicines,'' Park said. ``With such an initiative, we hope biotechnology will become the next-generation growth engine for our economy.''
Thus far, domestic companies have failed to create new drugs due to a lack of funds or top-notch researchers.
Local pharmaceutical firms have created only 13 drugs. This sharply contrasts to U.S. players that combine to come up with dozens of new ones every year.
Instead of working on new medicines, most Korean players have paid attention to work on generic drugs, the bio-equivalent of the original ones.
However, the FTA agreed to in April will damage this strategy because of the stronger enforcement of intellectual property rights.
In this climate, the government has tried to draft a set of measures to bring a paradigm shift to the local pharmaceutical industry _ from duplicators of generic drugs to new medicine creators.