Photo: Screenshot of the official WeChat account of Qilu Pharmaceutical

A Chinese pharmaceutical company recently shipped one of its cancer medications - cisplatin injections - to the US amid an ongoing cancer drug shortage there, reflecting the huge cooperation potential for industries between the two countries.

A severe shortage of cancer therapies in the US "is forcing thousands of patients to miss life-saving treatments," the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing warnings from local healthcare organizations.

Qilu Pharmaceutical Co received an emergency email in March from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking that if the drug-maker based in East China's Shandong Province could ship cisplatin injection to the US, according to a statement released by the company on May 31.

It took only two months for the medicine to be approved by the FDA, representing the influence of the company's products in the American market and the international competitiveness of Chinese brands, the company said.

Normally it takes more than two years to receive approval to ship a medicine to the US, local newspaper the Jinan Daily reported, citing Zhang Hanchang, vice chairman of Qilu Pharmaceutical.

The cisplatin injection is the 24th product developed by the company now on sale in the US. Nearly half of its products sold in the country are market frontrunners, and many of them have a market share of above 50 percent, the report said. 

Despite Washington's "decoupling" push from China, especially in the high-tech sectors, business representatives from both nations have seen increasingly frequent exchanges over recent months. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, among others, have publicly expressed their objection against "decoupling" and their intention to further expand cooperation within the Chinese market.

The Chinese and the US economies are deeply intertwined. Bilateral economic and trade cooperation based on mutual trust and mutual benefit is in the fundamental interest of both countries and peoples and also good for the world, Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao said at a meeting with US companies in Shanghai on May 22.


Global Times