State support to pharma firms to help in developing new TB drugs

Drug development to treat tuberculosis will depend on some sort of advance commitment from government agencies to procure anti-TB drugs from pharmaceutical companies which otherwise have to go through a bidding process for supplying anti-TB drugs.

Presently, government procures anti-TB drugs from companies through a bidding process which lowers margins.

“There should be some sort of an advance market selling anti-TB vaccine to provide incentives to drug companies for developing drugs in the wake of the rising number of TB patients in the country,” R D Joshi, senior consultant of Interlink Marketing Consultancy, said.

Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is one of the most prevalent of diseases in the country.

As per government estimates, every year around 1.8 million persons develop the disease of which 800,000 are infectious. Around 370,000 people die of TB annually which is around 1,000 people a day.

The disease is also a major barrier to social and economic development as an estimated 100 million workdays are lost due to the illness.

Also, the country has to incur a huge cost of nearly $3 billion in indirect costs and around $300 million as direct cost due to this disease burden.

However, with the implementation of the Revised National Tuberculosis Programme (RNTP), the government is trying to reduce the disease burden through ‘directly-observed treatment’, short-course (DOTs) regime.

“There are some fundamental issues in the treatment of TB as usually poor people with less resources discontinue treatment after two-three months without completing the full dosage of 180 days. Also, the treatment of TB should be concurrent with proper nutritional support which is not counselled to the patients,” Joshi told Business Standard.

New drugs should be developed that takes less treatment time, to restrict the spread of the disease, he added.

In the mean time, pharma majors like Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Lupin Laboratories, Novartis India among others are collaborating with TB Alliance — an international alliance — to discover new drugs for the treatment of TB.

“We partner various agencies and organisations in TB eradication programme. While we are pre-qualified as a supplier to the Global Drug Facility (GDF), we also supply to various international institutions like Pan American Health Organisation, Medicines Sans Frontier and the Damien Foundation,” a spokesperson of Lupin said.

Lupin, which commands close to 48 per cent marketshare in a Rs 300 crore Indian anti-TB market, had a growth rate of over 7 per cent last fiscal and remains bullish on the segment, he added.

The company has been expanding its offerings in the multi-drug resistant TB category, the spokesperson said.

As per an estimate of the World Health Organisation, MDR-TB killed 150,000 people in 2008 and infected 440,000 globally.