(Yicai Global) March 31 -- Many scientists and core staff of biomedical companies are hunkering down at their premises in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of key medicines, such as cancer drugs, as the city enters a phased lockdown to battle the latest wave of Covid-19.

“Some scientists have voluntarily stayed behind at the office to ensure that their work on cell cultures, experimental synthesis and efficacy trials continues,” a staff member at a cancer drug developer told Yicai Global.

Hundreds of employees have been living in Boehringer Ingelheim’s Zhangjiang plant since March 16 to ensure drug supply. The antitumor medicines the firm makes here are life-saving therapies for many people and production cannot stop, the German pharma giant told Yicai Global.

“In addition to research, we are teaming up with manufacturers to reduce the lockdown impact through regional resource allocation,” said a source from another company in Zhangjiang Pharma Valley, which is home to more than 1,400 biotech enterprises that employ around 70,000 people. “We hope that the office in Pudong district can reopen as soon as possible,” he added.

Hua Medicine can cope with the current situation, a senior manager said. There are some delays in clinical and contract research organization trials, but other work is little impacted.

Innovative pharma firms need to strengthen their ability to cope with such difficulties, such as by enhancing cooperation with CRO institutions, better communication with hospital ethics committees and adopting telemedicine and digital technologies with research institutes and regulatory agencies to ensure the smooth progress of clinical trials, said Xu Chao, a pharmaceutical analyst with US research institute Frost & Sullivan.

“Enterprises and regulators can establish an online clinical trial data management system to solve problems such as patients’ informed consent, ethics and logistics in order to adjust the clinical trial model,” Xu added.

Editor: Kim Taylor