BEIJING—Big drug makers from the West are making a new kind of push into fast-growing Asian markets: creating drugs for diseases that are more prevalent there.
Within the past year, Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drug company by sales, began work in China on an anti-inflammatory compound to treat liver disease, a big killer in Asia. Health-products giant Johnson & Johnson announced last month a collaboration with a university in Beijing to research infectious diseases threatening the region. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. also last month announced a partnership with Nanjing-based Simcere Pharmaceutical Group to develop a cancer treatment.
The approach marks a shift from the industry's history of designing medicines for patients in the West. While multinational drug makers might study experimental medicines in Asian subjects, the companies would use the clinical-trial results to gain regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe.
Western drug makers often bypassed medical conditions specific to Asia. Liver disease, certain cancers and some infectious diseases are more prevalent in countries like China and Thailand because of differences in the environment, genetic factors and some behaviors.
Firms are now pouring into Asian markets with the goal that growth there will help them cope with pricing pressures and aging products in the U.S. and Europe. Sizable and increasing numbers of Asians can afford to buy Western drugs. About $40 billion of prescription drugs are sold in China, for instance, and the market is growing about 25% a year, according to David Maris, an analyst at CLSA, an Asia-focused investment group headquartered in Hong Kong. The pharmaceutical market in the U.S. and Europe is growing 2% to 5% a year.
Given the market's size, more pharmaceutical executives are starting to see the region's specific medical needs as potential sources of profit. U.S. and European drug makers have invested more than a billion dollars over the past year into building research-and-development and manufacturing capabilities in the area, according to CLSA.
And more investment is on the way. In announcing job cuts last month, Bayer AG said it wanted to use the savings for the "expansion of capacities in Asia," including the addition of 2,500 jobs in emerging markets.
Pfizer opened a research facility in Shanghai five years ago and established a network of doctors and academics to give input on the clinical needs of patients there. The New York company saw an opportunity in an anti-inflammatory compound that showed promise for treating liver disease. The disease can follow infection with the hepatitis B virus, which is much more common in Asia than in the West. Some 70% to 90% of people in China and some other Asian countries are infected with hepatitis B by the age of 40, compared to fewer than 20% in North America and Western Europe, according to the World Health Organization.
Johnson & Johnson's collaboration with Tsinghua University—one of the top universities in Beijing whose tree-lined campus is filled with gleaming research centers and surrounded by Chinese offices of U.S. technology giants Google and Microsoft—illustrates a partnership approach to drug R&D. The goal of the project's early-stage laboratory work is to better understand diseases like hepatitis B, tuberculosis and bird flu, paving the way for new therapies.
Since 2008, J&J has been involved in another partnership with Tianjin Medical University to improve treatment of head, neck and other cancers prevalent in Asia.
Tianjin Medical University, about 80 miles southeast of Beijing, has about 2,000 inpatient cancer beds. It is collecting tumor tissues and blood cells from each patient.
By collaborating with the university, J&J hopes to more quickly identify distinctive biomarkers, such as genes or proteins, that might signal which drugs would work best for what cancer patients, said William Hait, J&J's head of oncology.
J&J helped train local researchers on how to do detailed genetic and molecular work because they "didn't have critical mass of people with these capabilities," said Dr. Hait. The training has taken longer than expected, but the research projects are up and running, he said.
Bristol-Myers is taking yet a different approach—by licensing to a Chinese firm the development of a compound that shows promise for treating gastric, esophageal and lung cancers.
The New York drug maker sold the compound's Chinese development and marketing rights after deciding a local company could do the work more efficiently. Under the terms, Simcere will run and fund the research through mid-stage human development.
Though this might mean giving up the short-term benefit of selling any resulting products in China, Bristol-Myers can draw long-term lessons from the experience, said Jeremy Levin, who oversees transactions at Bristol-Myers. "We're learning from others in other countries," he said.
All of the drugs targeting diseases prevalent in Asia remain years off. Yet, their development can pay immediate dividends by generating goodwill with Asian patients and governments impressed by the focus on local medical needs, said Sati Sian, general manager in China of IMS Health, a drug industry consultancy.
Companies may face some skepticism from patients, however.
Mr. Chi, a 48-year-old Beijing resident who asked to be identified only by his family name, said it is a positive that Western drug companies are trying to make more new medicines but he doesn't like their focus on treating diseases more common in Asian populations with the intention of selling them first to people in China. "I would wonder why you [the company] don't start giving it to people in your country first," said Mr. Chi, a building manager.
Mr. Chi, who was waiting to see a doctor Monday because he was suffering from an upset stomach, generally prefers traditional Chinese medicines for "regulating" bodily processes, like problems with sleeping, because they are made of natural ingredients and have fewer side effects than Western medicines.
Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com and Jonathan D. Rockoff at jonathan.rockoff@wsj.com
