HK can help 'bend the curve' on rising drug costs: FS

Financial Secretary Paul Chan on Friday said Hong Kong can play a key role in reversing the rising cost of bringing new medicines to patients, as he opened the third International Bio-Computing Innovation Summit in the SAR. In his opening speech, Chan drew on two contrasting "laws" to frame the challenge facing the life sciences industry. Moore's Law describes how the cost of computing power has gone down – while medicine is going down the opposite path. For some seven decades, he said, the cost of bringing a new drug to patients roughly doubled every nine years, a phenomenon known as Eroom's Law. "Behind that rising curve are promising treatments that were never able to secure funding, and patients waiting for better medical options," Chan said. "Eroom's Law describes the past. It needs not dictate the future." Chan identified three forces that could help "bend the curve", and said Hong Kong could contribute to each. The first is the power of computing to transform biological research, he said, as gene sequencing becomes cheaper and AI allows scientists not only to read the code of life, but to model and "write" it – designing molecules, antibodies and enzymes rather than relying on laboratory trial and error. He noted that...