Red tape cut for new drug approvals – China’s latest business and technology news

Business & Technology

A summary of the top news in Chinese business and technology for October 9, 2017. Part of the daily The China Project newsletter, a convenient package of China’s business, political, and cultural news delivered to your inbox for free. Subscribe here.

FILE PHOTO: An Apple logo hangs above the entrance to the Apple store on 5th Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City, July 21, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo

China’s State Council announced new rules for approvals for drugs and medical devices, intended to speed up the process by cutting red tape and allowing the use of data from clinical trials performed outside of China. Bloomberg says that the new rules should ease “bottlenecks” in the approvals process and present “a growth opportunity for international and local drugmakers in the world’s second biggest pharmaceutical market.”

In other healthcare news, the New York Times reports (paywall) on a study that tested 487 treatments from purveyors of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Hong Kong. The result: The researchers found “1,234 hidden ingredients, including both approved and banned Western drugs, drug analogues and animal thyroid tissue” in the samples tested.