China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently released its Industrial Structural Adjustment Guideline Catalog (2024 version) on its official website. The guideline is divided into three categories: encouragement, restriction, and elimination. The medical industry falls under all three categories, with 5 items being encouraged, 6 being restricted, and 13 being eliminated (including outdated production processes and products).
It should be noted that the policy orientation of the guideline is to: first, promote the high-end, intelligent, and green development of the manufacturing industry; second, consolidate the leading position of advantageous industries; third, accelerate the short-board supplement in fields related to security development; and fourth, construct a new system of high-quality and efficient service industry.The encouraged items under the medical industry category include breakthroughs and applications in core pharmaceutical technologies such as advanced manufacturing and low-carbon technology for raw materials such as membrane separation, new crystallization, chiral synthesis, enzymatic synthesis, and continuous reactions; new drug formulation technology, new biodelivery methods, large-scale and efficient cell culture and purification, peptide and nucleic acid synthesis for medicinal purposes, antibody coupling, vector virus preparation, etc., which can be upgraded through modern biotechnology.
New drug development and industrialization include innovative drugs and modified new drugs with independent intellectual property rights, children's drugs, drugs for rare and neglected diseases, major disease prevention and control vaccines, new antibody drugs, recombinant protein drugs, nucleic acid drugs, biocatalysts, gene therapy, and cellular therapy drugs.
Supportive industries for biomedicine include the development and production of chemical composition-limited cell culture media, new purification fillers and filtration membrane materials, high-end accessories for medicine, vaccine adjuvants, new medical packaging materials and technologies such as special functional materials, new packaging systems and drug delivery devices such as plug and play, intelligent packaging, etc.; high-end and intelligent pharmaceutical equipment, new preparation production equipment, large-scale bioreactors and ancillary systems, protein high-efficiency separation and purification equipment, continuous production equipment for drugs; standardized breeding of laboratory animals and animal experimentation services.
Innovative development of high-end medical equipment includes new genetic, protein, and cell diagnostic equipment, new medical diagnostic equipment and reagents, high-performance medical imaging equipment, high-end radiation therapy equipment, emergency and critical care life support equipment, artificial intelligence-assisted medical equipment, mobile and remote diagnosis and treatment equipment, high-end rehabilitation aids, high-end implantation intervention products, surgical robots, and other high-end surgical equipment and consumables, as well as the development and application of biomedicine materials and additive manufacturing technology.
Finally, traditional Chinese medicine will be encouraged to innovate and pass on its technologies, including the inheritance and innovation of Chinese medicine identification technology and Chinese medicine decoction technology, the development and production of traditional Chinese medicine innovative drugs and modified new drugs, ancient classic compound prescriptions, and ethnic medicines, as well as the development and application of new technologies, new equipment, and new processes such as efficient extraction of traditional Chinese medicine, whole-process quality control, and information traceability.
Overall, the Industrial Structural Adjustment Guideline Catalog (2024 version) will play an important role in promoting the development of China's medical industry by emphasizing high-end technologies, innovative products, and efficient service systems.