Health is wealth, going private 'is the future'

His council "has realized the importance of working with China. The investment and organization of the stem cell biology field in China has seen a sea change over the last few years", Buckle says.

The two partners have currently funded nine groups of researchers. "Each group involves a UK lab and a Chinese lab because we want to encourage scientists from both countries to work together," says Buckle.

Despite China's rising standards of medical research, it still needs to improve the environment for large clinical trials, says Rury Holman, a professor of diabetic medicine and director of the University of Oxford Diabetes Trials Unit.

"China needs more trained people in hospitals to do clinical research. It also needs to develop a research culture that provides doctors and research nurses with the dedicated space and time needed to undertake research in hospitals," Holman says.

Holman is currently leading a team of academics in researching how to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in China. Starting in 2008, this large trial is expected to finish in 2017. It is collecting data over six years from 7,500 patients across 150 Chinese hospitals.

This project and other research programs also seek to discover the long-term effects of specific diabetes drugs for the Chinese population because China often lacks such data and its government guidelines on diabetes drugs rely heavily on guidelines of Western countries.

"China's State Food and Drug Administration will have the option of using the results of our research work to create its own guidelines on diabetes, which will include, for example, drugs for first-line treatment and then how to personalize drugs for patients," he says.

Looking to the future, China's healthcare sector will provide many more opportunities for foreign players, especially in the fields of drugs, medical insurance investment, IT and medical equipment, says Norbert Meyring, head of KPMG Life Science in China and Asia-Pacific. "I assume there will be an 18 percent to 20 percent annual growth in Chinese drug spending through 2015 due to robust economic growth and a rising middle class."

He says China's medical sector and basic medical insurance system are opening up to private and foreign capital and, at the same time, more global IT providers are entering China's medical market to drive a faster transformation in the country's healthcare system.

"China's healthcare reform will also trigger a vast demand in the medical devices segment. China's medical device market is expected to become the world's second-largest by 2015," Meyring says.