Chinese anti-malarial drug producer battling against fake drugs

China's Holley Group, one of the world's largest producers of anti-malarial drugs, is being haunted by fake versions of its Cotecxin drug being exported to Africa.

Earlier this month, Nigerian media, citing the country's National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control, reported that three consignments of counterfeit pharmaceutical drugs, including Cotecxin, had been seized at the international airport in Lagos.

In an exclusive interview, Wang Licheng, chairman of Holley Group, a private company based in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, told Xinhua that the popularity of Contecxin has triggered counterfeiting by some illegal producers. "They should be blamed and punished, as they have caused suffering to both African malaria patients and my company."

Chinese law prohibits fake medicine that might bring bad effects to patients. The government has tightened control the planting of artemisinin-bearing herbs in China as unscientific planting has caused some herbs to mutate.

Chinese health officials said that the quality of Cotecxin exported to Africa through correct channels can be guarranted.

Cotecxin was listed by the World Health Organization as a major anti-malarial drug in 2004 and is now widely used in Africa.

Wang said that in Kisumu District of Kenya several years ago a woman contracted malaria during pregnancy.

"If she had taken quinine or chloroquine, the other anti-malarial drugs on the market at the time, she would have survived but her baby would have been lost or born with deformities. Her doctors tried Cotecxin and the mother made a full recovery and the baby was born healthy. The mother named the child Cotecxin," he said.

In June 2006, Holley-Cotec, a pharmaceutical arm of the Holley Group, placed an advertisement in a Kenyan newspaper to try to find the girl. There was no response but the company uses a photo taken of her a few years earlier on its publicity materials.

Wang had no real pharmaceutical background six years ago. But realizing the need to develop a more effective anti-malarial drug, he invested more than 300 million yuan (38 million U.S. dollars) in planting raw materials, extracting Cotecxin and producing anti-malarial drugs.

Now Holley Group sells more than 20 million U.S. dollars worth of Cotecxin annually. It has the drugs registered in 40-plus African countries and has donated the medicine to more than two million African people.

"These achievements please me but I feel even heavier burdens weighing down on my shoulders," Wang said.

"After visits to Nigeria, Keyna and Uganda, I realized that the number of patients dying from malaria is still on the rise every year as anti-malarial drugs are unaffordable to 80 percent of the world's sufferers."

The sale price is several times the factory price. "Products made by European companies are even more expensive," Wang added.

Holley Group, in partnership with a global anti-malarial drug foundation, is trying to persuade African governments or religious groups to build Cotecxin marketing networks in order to reduce the price of Cotecxin.

"Six years ago, my ambition was to develop traditional Chinese medicine. Now, I would like to reduce the retail price of every dose of Cotecxin from five U.S. dollars to one dollar," Wang said.

Source: Xinhua