Investors give prognosis for healthcare investment in Asia - AVCJ Forum

"Over the past decade China's GDP has been growing at a rate of 10% a year, while the growth rate in the healthcare sector has been 30%, and I firmly believe it will continue to grow at a similar rate over the next few years," said Leon Chen, founder and managing partner with Frontline Bioventures.

Chen gave an upbeat view on the future of Chinese healthcare during a pharmaceuticals and life sciences panel discussion at the AVCJ Forum involving representatives from India, China and Australia.

He expects the country's healthcare market to be worth as much as $1 trillion by 2020, thanks to a combination of government investment and the large pool of Chinese returning home following stints with foreign pharmaceutical firms.

"The government is pushing for a transition from a manufacturing economy to an innovation economy, so you are going to see new medicine, new devices and new innovation in manufacturing processes," Chen added. At present just a handful of Chinese-developed drugs could be classed innovative but he expects this to increase exponentially in the new few years.

"The dynamics in India are similar to that of China, the market will grow to around $300 billion in the next seven years, a third of size of china market," said Sunny Sharma, senior managing director at Orbimed Advisors in India. "There are some areas where we are little more established than China, such a healthcare services and generic medicine and our fund currently invests across of the major sub-sectors of healthcare apart from research and development."

By contrast Brigitte Smith, co-founder and managing director of GBS venture partners in Sydney, said R&D represents a large part of the Australian healthcare sector.

"We have just 23 million people instead of more than one billion so the domestic market is not terribly important," she said. "We focus very deeply on R&D and we have a history of medical research and a skilled clinical infrastructure. Companies such as GlaxoSmithKline do more first-in-man studies in Australia that anywhere in the world. It is a good place to do new products."

Where Australia is lacking, says Smith, was is the lack of numbers for phase three studies. "I think there is an opportunity to work with counties that don't want the risk of doing first-in-man studies but have large number such as China and India."

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Greater China
• Australasia
• South Asia
• Venture
• Venture
• Pharmaceuticals
• China
• India
• Australia