China making great strides in medical innovation

The Chinese medical community has made significant progress in its ability to innovate in the past decade, a health official said on Thursday.

Liu Dengfeng, an official with the National Health Commission's Department of Health Science, Technology and Education, said that two major campaigns aimed at improving medical innovation since 2008 have led to the development of 80 first-class innovative drugs.

"China has made great strides in making innovative — rather than generic — drugs, improving the quality of pharmaceutical companies and strengthening the prevention, control, diagnosis and treatment of contagious diseases," he said.

Meanwhile, China has built 50 national-level clinical research centers covering a large number of common diseases, as well as 75 key laboratories for biomedical studies.

There has also been progress in the development of pathogenic microbe labs, where researchers work to determine how to mitigate the effects of dangerous infectious diseases.

Liu said that there are 63 biosafety level 3 and level 4 labs across China, and 46,000 biosafety level 2 labs.