HONG KONG – As part of an ongoing process of strengthening the country's drug regulatory structure, the CFDA is looking to end region-to-region variation in the strength of clinical trial oversight.

Representatives from top-tier domestic and multinational drugmakers as well as major hospitals across the country urged the national industry watchdog to continue clamping down on subpar clinical trials during a recent meeting with the authority. Large amounts of falsified, inaccurate and incomplete data found in the verification procedure last year has put pressure on drugmakers, medical institutions and clinical research organizations.

"Currently, there is still a big gap between the pharmaceutical industry in China and other markets. We mainly face weaknesses in research and development, inspection over clinical trials and product evaluation," CFDA Director Bi Jingquan said during the meeting, according to Chinese language comments released by the agency.

While pushing to tighten the way the country evaluates clinical trials, the "CFDA will enforce efforts on clinical research training," said the director. The aim of those dual track efforts is to fundamentally improve the quality of drug manufacturing in the country.

The CFDA started cracking down on weak clinical trials and focusing on the quality of the trials themselves through this past year. It first issued a far-reaching circular in July, mandating applicants for a total of 1,622 drug registration applications to conduct self-inspection and verification of their clinical trial data with a view to ensure authenticity and reliability of the data.

"It is a good initiative that can reduce bad applications in the backlog so that those companies which have always played by rules can see their application moving forward faster instead of just waiting," said Helen Chen, director and partner of L.E.K. Consulting, an industry specialist.

In December alone, 82 companies voluntarily pulled their drug marketing applications while the CFDA itself rejected a number of other applications.

Ahead of the meeting, the CFDA further stepped up its efforts to verify clinical trials by strengthening provincial inspection teams and individual inspectors.

"The inspection work in some regions is not being taken seriously enough and the quality of inspection is too low," said the regulator in a recent announcement.

In that announcement, the CFDA published a seven-point plan calling for regional regulators to further implement strengthened clinical trial oversight and data quality programs. The national authority asked its regional counterparts to submit by Jan. 10 internally audited data for any of the 1,622 programs listed in July that had yet to be verified by the end of December, as well as on any marketing applications submitted after July.

And the CFDA has gone further than just requesting data by asking regional officials to investigate any company that refuses to withdraw an application that may prove to be substandard.

For their part, regional drug administration inspectors that fail to pull subpar applications could be held as accountable as the companies themselves.

"In the short term, some companies, including drugmakers as well as clinical trial organizations, especially those floppy ones, would feel panic and need to do lots of work. But overall it is good for the whole industry," said Chen.

Those announcements suggest a newfound resolution within the CFDA to tighten the supervision over the country's drug sector, which has been growing at a rapid pace and has become the world's second largest market in the world following the U.S.

Last month, the CFDA announced tentative plans to develop a credit rating system for both the food and drug industries. Under the proposed system, all drugmakers could be rated based on a nationally developed standard. Companies with credit ratings of C, which would refer to lack of credit worthiness, and D, an acute lack of credit worthiness, will be "harshly punished," according to the regulator, although details of how the system would work or how it will be implemented have yet to be disclosed.

The CFDA did say, however, that a data bank with the credit status of all food and drug manufactures could be established by the end of 2016.