China’s Rising Biotechnology Industry

As amongst the most powerful and influential fields in the 21st century, biotechnology has turned into an industry of significant importance to China. The nation has the potential to achieve the leading position worldwide in some of the segments of the industry, including super crossbreed rice reproducing, innovation and application, transgenic plant research and animal somatic cell cloning.

In China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2010-2015), it featured seven emerging industries that could transform China’s economy and fuel its development. As one of these seven pillars, the biotechnology industry would get an increasing portion of the $1.7 trillion budget the Chinese government had allocated for the five-year period. China declared that it would spend an extra $11.8 billion to advance the biotechnology industry from 2015 to 2020, as the nation moves to its 13th Five-Year Plan.

The added value of the biotechnology industry will account for over 4% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020, said the report jointly published by the social development department of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and the China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD).

Biotechnology can enable the world to solve old issues in new ways. Through the art of utilizing living cells and the revelation of new particles, biotechnology development has the possibility of addressing our most earnest needs: fighting diseases, serving food for the hungry, and enhancing the environment. Nations around the globe are realizing the importance of biotechnology for their economies, the wellbeing and prosperity of their residents, their food supply, their capability to produce clean energy and the like.

China, specifically, has made developing the biotechnology industry one of its top priorities. With about one-fifth of the global population, China is a vital market for biotech products and plays a key role in biotechnology product advancement and manufacturing. The country is expected to issue its first set of administrative models for organizations creating biosimilars. Moreover, China is formulating its regulatory policies closer to those of the U.S. and European Union, with one of many goals of expediting drug registration and approval.