August 10, 2005
The US-based drug company NexMed in mid July signed a cooperation agreement with the Industrial Technology Research Institute to devise quality control systems for the development of Chinese herbal medicines and the production of bulk pharmaceutical chemicals. As part of this plan NexMed and
ITRI have jointly established a NexMed subsidiary in Taiwan and plan to build a new factory in Taiwan.
The main focus of this new company will be to use NexMed's transdermal drug delivery system NexACT to give new market life to drugs whose patents have expired. Industry figures reveal there will be
USD 150 billion in business opportunities to come from the rejuvenation of old drugs between 2005 and 2015. The partners plan to develop 24 types of drugs. The subsidiary's initial capitalization of
NTD 500 million is to be increased gradually to
NTD 1 billion.
NexMed's Alprox-TD, a topically-applied cream for the treatment of male erectile dysfunction, has entered the third stage of clinical testing in the United States. The advantages of this product over oral erectile dysfunction drugs are that it is fast-acting and reduces certain side effects because it is administered directly through the skin of the penis.
ITRI has developed a comprehensive quality control platform for Chinese herbal medicine that uses liquid chromatography to asses the composition of herbal medicine raw materials. This system was designed to address discrepancies in the quality of herbal medicine materials. The accurate identification of the makeup of herbal materials will permit standardized testing which is essential to the determination of the efficacy of Chinese medicines and gaining government approval for putting new herbal drugs on the market.
(United Daily News, China Times)
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