Comment

The country had what was arguably its best pharmaceutical event in many years in Mumbai last week as the Department of Pharmaceuticals took the lead in mobilising a galaxy of pharmaceutical executives, both from India and abroad. The event, India Pharma Summit, is the brainchild of Ashok Kumar, secretary to the department, who has forged good relationships with the industry.

Kumar and his team of key officials, including Arun Jha and Devendra Chowdhury, could send out a positive signal that contentious issues will be taken up and a decisive role will be played by the government in bringing Indian and multinational companies closer in the areas of manufacturing, clinical research and fundamental drug discovery.

Though much desired, the Drug Controller General of India was absent from the show. Nonetheless, it was gratifying that the government took the effort to organise an interface with the industry, which has been complaining of a lack of proactive approach.

Also notable was the presence of National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) scientists who have been doing spectacular work in drug research but have been the unsung heroes behind products that today give the industry its millions.
Doubts, of course, were raised by stakeholders on regulatory bottlenecks and building trust for foreign companies before they could enter into relationships with Indian firms.
McKinsey consultants prodded multinational companies to look at India in a distinctively bigger manner from the current “projectised” approach in awarding contracts to Indian companies.

In fact, Indian companies till sometime back had the appetite to draw modules of research than bag big long-lasting deals. Full-time equivalents are still seen as a big catch by many, but in practice, it is known that these are back-end projects that do not contribute much to the intellectual property of the foreign company and are done at wafer-thin margins.
If all goes according to forecasts, the contract manufacturing space could quadruple to $8 billion by 2015 and Indian firms can scale up the value chain in associating with new leads from the basic screening process. On the whole, the Indian industry can easily grow to $40 billion in the next 6 years, mainly riding on the domestic market, exports and research and manufacturing collaborations.

Speakers at the event pointed out that options are shrinking with multinational companies than to shift locations of research or create virtual networks to facilitate faster turnarounds in Asia, mainly India or China. Off-shoring can keep growing, but cost advantage will gradually fade, requiring Indian organisations to master newer areas such as disease biology and medicinal chemistry, and become a rich resource for the western players.
Barry Bloom, a Harvard University professor, asked for a sharper approach to discovering anti-infective drugs as resistance may soon develop in a few areas like tuberculosis or malaria. At the same time, perspectives were added on how the once considered western diseases like dyslipidemia and heart ailments are now becoming more starkly identified with Indian population.

It will actually be very fascinating to see what happens to all the collaborations that are underway in the next five years. MNCs came to India to tie up with Indian companies, not by choice but mostly under compulsion as their pipelines dwindled, costs rose but approvals depleted.

It is almost an imperative now for Indian companies to see value and learn from the practices of multinational companies in drug discovery. The next step should be to see what could be the most appealing opportunities in new drug leads. Indian companies can themselves discover a compound for TB or for malaria or dengue given the patient size here, than support foreign companies in that effort. Modern tools like computational chemistry are helping weed out or at least minimise future failures and there is still enough room for companies to put a drug in the market at very low costs. Unfortunately, Indian promoters are running behind leads that fetch high returns but are less relevant to India.
More ironic is the fact that companies like Astra Zeneca, Novartis and GSK are chasing those leads that are important for tropical countries. Merck has gone one step ahead in setting up a new company for its vaccines initiative.

(Pillman is an executive closely linked to the global phama industry)