(Yicai) Aug. 7 -- China’s Singmed Medical Device Science and Technology has opened the largest production base for inhalers in Asia, aiming to advance localization of the devices and challenge the primacy of multinational drugmakers in its home market.

The CNY500 million (USD70 million) facility is located in Changshu, Jiangsu province, the Suzhou-based firm said yesterday. The largest research, development, and manufacturing center for dry powdered inhalers and soft mist inhalers in Asia, covering an area of 26,670 square meters, it can turn out 50 million nebulizers a year.

“Inhalers are one of the keys to the development of homegrown inhaled medication,” Singmed  founder Zhao Guangtao told Yicai. “Multinational pharmaceutical companies, such as Novartis, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, and GlaxoSmithKline, have dominated China’s inhaled medication market for a long time.”

The localization process is challenging since technologies from different fields are involved in making inhalers as they need high drug-device integration, he noted. The Changsu base will break the market monopoly of the multinational drugmakers and promote the development of China-made inhaled medications, Zhao pointed out.

Inhaled medications are mainly used to treat asthma and chronic obstructive lung diseases, Zhao said. They directly reach patients’ respiratory tract or lungs and has many advantages, such as quick action, high localized drug concentration, and low dosage requirements.

The inclusion of new indicators and the development of new drug delivery technologies, such as monodispersed porous polymer microspheres and drug delivery systems for sustained-release inhalations, are expected to bring new growth points for the market.

The Chinese market for inhaled drugs is expected to reach CNY26.7 billion (USD3.8 billion) by 2030, according to business consultants Frost & Sullivan.  

Editor: Futura Costaglione