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Kicking the foreign drug habit in Myanmar

 10-Oct-15, Frontier Myanmar

Progress Biochem’s new drug making factory looks as if it belongs in the International Space Station, not among the warehouses and smokestacks of Yangon’s industrial outskirts.

Kicking the foreign drug habit in Myanmar (c) Ann Wang Frontier Myanmar

Image: Ann Wang / Frontier Myanmar

The company’s chief executive officer, U Htoo Myint, didn’t try to contain his pride when he showed off its immaculate white corridors, glittering steel machinery, World Health Organization-standard laboratory and Myanmar-born architects and engineers.

All the factory needs to begin making Myanmar’s first privately-produced medicine is a licence.

For the last half century, a handful of state-owned factories – and one public-private joint venture – have produced Myanmar’s meagre pharmaceutical output. All other pharmaceutical products – between 80 percent and 90 percent – are imported, either from reputable international companies or bargain-bin producers that slip substandard or phony medication past the Department of Food and Drug Administration, the FDA.

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