Hutchison MediPharma's research and development operations are carried out in two R&D facilities in Shanghai's Zhangjiang High-tech Park, which total 75,000 ft2 including a 7,000 ft2 Chinese certified animal facility. The in-house pharmaceutical research facilities include specialized equipment for most aspects of drug research and development.
Hutchison MediPharma has developed drug discovery technologies, including molecular and cell biology, high throughput screening, genomics and informatics, to enable and support its research and development projects. To date, multiple proprietary drug discovery platforms have been created. These include gene-targeted and cell-based screening assays, ligand-dependent screening assays and signal transduction pathway screening assays in addition to conventional cytotoxicity, protein assays and enzymatic assays, receptor tyrosine kinase assays, primary cell culture assays, recombinant DNA technologies, gene-chip technologies, recombinant protein expression technologies, and retroviral-mediated gene transfer technologies.
Botanical candidate screening is being expanded to include upfront assays in addition to cytotoxicity for cancer and chemokines/gene regulators/enzymes for inflammation. The semi-synthetic candidate R&D activity aims to identify active components of natural products that are amenable to chemical modifications. This semi-synthetic research activity is generally intended to be an extension of existing botanical drug candidate research. In addition, synthetic single chemical entity approaches against clinically validated targets for cancer and autoimmune diseases are under development.
Hutchison MediPharma's research and development team includes Western-trained former research executives of international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as advisory committees including highly reputable members of the medical community in the US and China in the fields of medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, oncology, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and antiviral treatments.
Hutchison MediPharma's regulatory and clinical team, as well as its network of world-renowned advisers and clinical research organizations, enable the Group to design protocols and conduct clinical trials in both the US and China.
