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ShareMoving away from a proposal mooted in 2001 to set aside a meagre Rs 150 crore to fund drug discovery research, the department of pharmaceuticals now seems be more at grips with the global trends in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.
The department's willingness to spare up to $2 billion each year till 2020 to see India emerge as one of the world's top five pharmaceutical hubs is laudable.
That willingness can potentially transform the copycat culture of Indian drug companies to one of innovation, provided every stakeholder acts in constructive sync. More often than not, we see such processes get stymied by red tape of government babus as drug companies through their associations bicker over issues such as the modalities of disbursements, etc.
Though much smaller in size, there is no data on how the earlier Rs 150 crore granted by the government was allocated and spent. Who were the beneficiaries and what has been the progress on compounds selected for such funding? Nobody knows. Can there be some transparency to know what happened to the tax payer's money?
That earlier experiment should help the government in identifying the deserving companies, drug candidates and weed out the rest. The US FDA has successfully implemented grants and aid programmes for orphan drugs through careful scrutiny of the profiles of experimental molecules. There are lessons to learn from their models to ensure accountability.
The government's research funds can be put to best use if a group of respected researchers carefully study the proposals from every angle, such as the commercial viability, peer review of drug candidates across the labs globally, cost of human trials and regulatory submissions. Allocations can then be made more meaningfully.
Pompous speakers who want to hog the limelight often spoil the show by being on such powerful boards.
From what has been reported, the 2020 plan has talked about creation of five million jobs through achievement of specific programmes. The proposal, therefore, looks to have certain targets to create employment. Should the vision be to add numbers for employment or should it be more focused on funding an enterprise or scientists to work on a drug that can be brought into the market?
"Five out of ten drugs discovered in the world will be from India," a senior government official has stated.
The reality is, Indian companies have not been able to produce a single original drug brand and that's nothing short of humiliation.
This is tough, but doable, provided the entire machinery is geared to work in a spirited manner.
The next 10 years will see many more tectonic changes in the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. Chemistry is fast giving way to targeted therapies and with latest gadgets like the unravelled human genome sequence and leads in therapeutic stem cells, Indian drug companies will have to think out-of-the-box before they are left out of this supremacy race.
Our established research institutions have for long been neglected. The Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Central Drug Research Institute and NIPER are some of the research bases that can flourish if due recognition and partnerships are encouraged. Public-private partnerships are the way forward.
Significantly, US biotech firm Genzyme, which works on cutting edge research, is exploring possibilities to strike alliances with Indian research institutions.
One strong way to get better yields of the huge investment proposals could be to rope in Indian scientists from multinational companies. There are many Indian scientists who have worked for decades in great companies like Genentech and Amgen. The global downturn may get many of them back into the country and that brain power can be utilised to promote drugs for neglected diseases.
Another option that can drive new compounds into the market is combining research pools of Indian companies. For long, we have seen Indian companies developing their own pipelines, but failing to go beyond licensing those compounds out to multinational companies.
At times, when Pfizer joins forces with Wyeth and Roche consolidates its holding in Genentech, Indian companies can go beyond their narrow "promoter mentality" and create a stronger professionally run pharmaceutical company. It's a pity that Teva being the only large Israeli company can create so much of impact in the worldwide generic drug industry and also market its multiple sclerosis drug brand Copaxone. Dozens of Indian companies on the other hand are still scrambling to take a pie of the largely unprofitable generics market in the US.
The way forward will have to be dramatically different than the past. And that's the charm of fostering innovation. If run-of-the-mill norms of the past years are followed for the new funding programmes, we will get dud products and many excuses for failures.
Pillman is an executive closely linked to the global pharma industry.
