New Chinese player enters probiotics market

New Chinese player enters probiotics market
By Shane Starling, 01-Sep-2009



Fenchem says its entry into the probiotics market is prompted by global growth in demand for probiotic products in North America and Europe.

The Chinese supplier recently debuted seven “outstanding strains” after spending about two years researching more than 200 versions of the bioactive bacterium.

Company spokesperson, Junny Liu, told NutraIngredients.com Fenchem’s Pro-Fit range will target European and American markets with strains the company says are backed in in vitro and animal studies although she did not provide further details on these.

“The global probiotics market especially European market is now growing rapidly,” Liu said. “So we beginning to move into the probiotics market now. We screened out some strains with high activity and stability through in-vitro and animals studies.”

Liu said the studies were not yet published because the company was in the process of applying for a patent.

“According to the patent application principle, we can not open any information before the patent is granted,” she said. “So we have no plant to publish the studies at present.”

She said small trial deals had been signed with European and American companies, but the “quantity is not very large”.

Manufacturing methods

The seven strains in the Pro-Fit range are Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus paracasei, Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus rhamnosus, Bifidobacterium lactis and Bifidobacterium longum.

The strains are manufactured using protoplast fusion and recombination engineering technologies were also used to screen the strains and determine their biofunctions.

But the company would not provide further detail about these technologies.

Now that it is claiming membership in the community of probiotic suppliers, Fenchem has joined the Swiss-based International Probiotics Association (IPA), which counts the likes of Danisco and Chr Hansen, in its fold.

As an IPA member, Fenchem, “is authorised to join the forum for the exchange of research and latest breakthroughs in probiotic technology and new product development,” Liu said.

The company said the range was stable enough to be used in both supplements and functional foods and said the ingredient would target traditional probiotic health areas of gut health and immunity.

The company, which has a wide portfolio of offerings including prebiotic fibres in the gut health area, said it has three sectors of excellence for Pro-Fit:

* selection of strains
* high density and stability cultivation
* high density and stability production of “live probiotic powder”

While European and American markets have shown strong growth in recent years, along with others, probiotic health claims are yet to be approved anywhere in the world except Canada, which approved a series of gut health claims earlier this year.

Pharmaceutical giants eye China's booming market

Pharmaceutical giants eye China's booming market

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-24

China's ambitious $124-billion effort to provide basic health coverage for the vast majority of its 1.3 billion citizens by 2011 is a brimming opportunity for global pharmaceutical companies. As growth in the US and European markets remains sluggish, many giant pharmaceutical companies are expanding their sales forces, distribution channels and research operations in China to tap into the country's robust drug market. China's drug market is expected to grow about 22 percent annually over the next five years, said Mandy Chui, senior principal of (Intercontinental Marketing Services) IMS Health Inc.

Chui is the China expert at IMS Health, which provides market data on the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. "We see companies continuing to invest in China because the other markets are not growing," Chui said. "For companies, China's growth is certainly a good story to tell to Wall Street, right?" With a huge and aging population, rapid urbanization and adoption of Western lifestyles that give rise to hypertension, obesity and other diseases, China is poised to become the world's third-biggest pharmaceutical market by 2013, up from its current No 5 spot, said Chui.

The $24.5-billion market is expected to swell to between $68 billion and $78 billion by 2013, Chui said, leaving it behind only the US and Japan. "China is taking over from Germany and France," she said. "It's like a big wake-up call. If they (big pharmaceutical companies) are not in there at this point in time, all of them are not going to grow," Chui said.

In the race to penetrate the Chinese market, she said European drug makers such as Bayer AG, AstraZeneca PLC and Sanofi-Aventis SA have taken the lead. US drug makers were once content to grow in their home market, but now they are eager to "play catch-up," she said.

Pfizer Inc CEO Jeff Kindler said that China is an increasingly important priority for the world's biggest drug maker, which aims to make vaccines a big part of its China effort. "Not only is it necessary to be there, we are there," Kindler said.

Chui said drugs for diseases commonly seen in China, such as hepatitis B, will have blockbuster potential. An estimated 30 million of China's people have chronic infections with hepatitis B - a virus that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer.

Many large pharmaceutical companies have geared up their outreach efforts to increase treatment rates for the liver disease that kills more than 300,000 Chinese people a year, Chui said. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co's hepatitis B drug Baraclude - a pill introduced in 2006 - has the clear market lead in China over GlaxoSmithKline PLC's antivirals Heptodin and Hepsera, Bayer AG's Nexavar and several interferons, she said.

No company has any products of blockbuster scope, which typically means annual revenues of $1 billion or more. In China, Chui said, some could arrive within five to 10 years. Despite the price gap between generics and branded drugs, branded drugs that have lost patent protection still are favored in China, Chui said.