NEWS OF THE WEEK
DRUG INDUSTRY MEETS IN SHANGHAI PHARMACEUTICAL INGREDIENTS:
Exhibitors at CPhI China note the country’s increasing sophistication
the rest of the world descended on Shanghai last week for the pharmaceutical ingredients trade show CPhI China. The event provided participants another opportunity to witness the growing savvy of China’s fine chemicals industry. “Chinese companies are learning what foreign customers are looking for,” said William H. Tamblyn, director of technical commercial development at the catalyst supplier Johnson Matthey. “They are offering increasingly sophisticated products made in facilities that have been inspected and certified.” China exported $4.4 billion worth of pharmaceutical products JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY/C&EN
CPhI China was held in Shanghai last week.
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RECORD 1,700 EXHIBITORS from China and
NANOPARTICLES WORKING TOGETHER CANCER THERAPY: Tiny materials
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TWO-COMPONENT, nanoparticle-based system
efficiently pinpoints and delivers drugs to tumor cells in mice by using blood-clotting enzymes to enable the components to communicate, according to a report in Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/nmat3049). Developed by a team led by Sangeeta N. Bhatia, a bioengineer at MIT, the communicating particles are able to deliver 40 times as high a dose of drug as one type of particle can deliver by itself. Although “sequential dosing schemes have been tried before with particles” that bind one another rather than communicate, Bhatia says, they “have lacked the signal amplification of our method.” This approach could enable physicians to administer to patients a GARY CARLSON/NAT. MATER .
In a two-component nanosystem, nanorods (blue) accumulate in a tumor and broadcast its position to drugcarrying liposomes (pink) that can treat the cancer.
‘talk’ to one another to locate, treat tumors in mice
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in 2010, a 30% rise over 2009, according to official customs data. The event was a forum for Chinese drug ingredient makers to seek out foreign clients. “There are more and more Chinese exhibitors at this trade show, and yet the number of producers in China is actually coming down,” noted Oliver Ju, CEO of China’s Porton Fine Chemicals. Many producers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the coastal province of Zhejiang are struggling with intense cost pressure as they try to meet increasingly strict environmental regulations, Ju explained. Some Western firms, such as Johnson Matthey, see business potential in the rise of China’s drug industry. “There’s a lot of talk about China’s rising manufacturing costs,” Tamblyn said. “But you can also look at that as rising affluence and therefore a growing Chinese demand for high-quality pharmaceuticals.” Chemwerth, a U.S. firm that markets APIs made in China, also sees opportunity. “China wants a strong drug industry, and it’s investing in that,” said CEO Peter J. Werth. “Yet Chinese suppliers have still not had much success selling APIs in the U.S. market on their own.” Although Chemwerth has traditionally served U.S. customers, interest in Chinese-made APIs is rising elsewhere, according to Werth. Several Indian manufacturers of generic drugs, he explained, rely on Chemwerth’s quality assurance infrastructure in China to source Chinese APIs.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS TREMBLAY
smaller amount of chemotherapeutics than is currently used, thus reducing the side effects of treatment. The system consists of two types of nanoparticles: polyethylene glycol-coated gold nanorods and cancerdrug-bearing liposomes tagged with a peptide that binds to an enzyme in the blood-clotting cascade. First, the researchers inject mice with the nanorods. When they shine near-infrared light on the rodents’ tumors, the light locally heats the nanorods that find their way into the tumor. The heat damages the tumors’ blood vessels and initiates clotting. The researchers then inject the mice with the tagged liposomes loaded with the cancer drug doxorubicin. As people in distress might send a flare to direct rescuers to their location, the nanorods direct the drugcarrying liposomes to the tumor through the clotting enzyme to which the liposomes are designed to bind. In addition to delivering a higher concentration of doxorubicin to tumors than liposomes alone can, the two-component nanosystem also prevented tumor growth in mice for more than 20 days after treatment, the researchers show. “This work demonstrates the innate benefits that can be offered through the use of different nanoparticles united into one treatment strategy,” says Dean Ho, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University. Future studies, he says, should illuminate a spectrum of diseases to which scientists can apply this coordinated approach.—LAUREN WOLF
JUNE 27, 2011
