The National Center for Drug Screening (NCDS) and US-based Cellomics Inc will work together to establish a cutting-edge drug screening platform to upgrade China's drug innovation system.

"The establishment of HCS (high content screening) will change the traditional drug discovery process, and signals a new phase of drug innovation in China," said Wang Mingwei, director of NCDS.

Affiliated with the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) and Chinese Academy of Sciences, the center is a key national drug technology innovation base.

Traditional drug development technologies fail to develop drugs that target all the causes of an illness.

HCS, by contrast, focuses on the cells and may automate the definition of the cell function, specific genes as well as proteins. The process may, in turn, greatly speed up the discovery of active compounds and improve the success rate of new drugs.

HCS has been applied by more than 100 pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, but the technology is now being introduced to China for the first time.

Aided by genetic technology, drug innovation worldwide has entered a new era and experts predict that within 20 years, there will be an explosion of new drugs, say 20,000 to 30,000.

"So China seeks overseas cooperation in this area with both the academic circle and the pharmaceutical industry," said Chen Zhu, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, during a media conference held Thursday in Shanghai.

"Through this collaboration, we can expand HCS in China and throughout Asia," said Daniel Calvo, president and CEO of Cellomics.

Cellomics is an overseas company who has worked in China since the late 1990s.

China is a big drug production base, but it has not yet developed a strong pharmaceutical industry in terms of drug innovation. New drugs account for less than 3 percent.

But China's pharmaceutical industry is changing as some new major centers such as NCDS are built.

(China Daily September 3, 2004)