By Fineline Cube 
The Beijing Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau, in collaboration with seven other bureaus, has released the “Several Measures to Support the High-quality Development of Innovative Drugs in Beijing (2025),” effective immediately. These 32 measures are designed to enhance the city’s innovative drug ecosystem through improvements in clinical trial efficiency, regulatory review processes, production support, market access, and investment promotion.
Clinical Trial Efficiency
The measures aim to benchmark international standards by reducing the initiation timeline for clinical trials to within 20 weeks and increasing the mutual recognition rate of ethical reviews for multi-center trials to over 90%. Initiatives include the development of automated and intelligent biological sample libraries for key diseases and the expansion of international clinical trial capabilities.
Regulatory Review Acceleration
Beijing is streamlining its review and approval processes, cutting the approval time for innovative drug clinical trials from 60 to 30 working days. The city also plans to expand the variety of innovative drug pilot projects and reduce the review time for drug supplement applications from 200 to 60 working days. By 2025, the goal is to approve at least 15 new innovative pharmaceutical and medical products annually.
Production and Market Support
The measures support cross-border production for overseas drug marketing authorization holders and expand import categories for rare disease drugs. Beijing will also facilitate the import of urgently needed clinical drugs and medical devices through expedited approval channels.
Clinical Use Innovation
National negotiation drugs will be directly included in the drug catalogs of designated medical institutions, with innovative drugs granted expedited listing and excluded from medical insurance self-payment rate indicators.
AI in Drug Development
Beijing will establish collaborative mechanisms for medical data annotation and encourage the creation of AI research and development centers to enhance drug innovation.
Investment and Financing Support
The city will establish a pharmaceutical and health industry fund of RMB 50 billion (USD 683 million) and a pharmaceutical M&A fund of RMB 10 billion (USD 137 million), leveraging existing investment funds to strengthen listing and financing services.
Industry Layout Optimization
Plans include constructing an international pharmaceutical innovation park and enhancing the industrial capacity of Zhongguancun Life Science Park.
Talent and Intellectual Property
Beijing will cultivate and introduce 1,000 outstanding talents and improve intellectual property services to support innovation in the pharmaceutical sector.-Fineline Info & Tech