Innovation to drive next wave of pharma growth

 

Efficiency and innovation alone would help the Indian pharmaceutical industry ride the emerging wave of biosimilars, the approved similar versions of biopharmaceutical products, said panelists on the current biologics and biosimilars market at the BioAsia conference here on Tuesday.

 

Though Indian companies are expected to market their own biosimilar products in developed countries in the next 10 years, the path to develop them will not be based on cheaper manpower costs or the cost of infrastructure, according to Sahib MK, director (genomics and biotechnology), Wockardt Research Centre.

“What we need is efficiency and innovative thinking on how to reduce the cost of product development,” he said, adding the pharma industry as such was inefficient as there was a huge time gap between innovation and product development that was driving up the costs.

According to Alex Kudrin, medical assessor, biological licensing division of Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, UK, the affordability of these products over the originator drugs is going to be the driving factor for the growth of the biosimilar market globally.

However, approvals and general acceptance to these products from the medical fraternity in the regulated markets is not going to be easy. Kudrin said there are were also examples where the approvals for certain biosimilar products had to be revoked on issues of efficacy.

Subir Basak, president (global discovery) of Jubilant Lifesciences, said the success of the Indian industry in the biosimilars space largely depended on how it would differentiate itself in terms of efficiency.

Sridaran Natesan, vice president (external innovation, science strategy and policy) of Sanofi, said the failure rate together with the cost of clinical trials was contributing to the rise in cost of drug discovery globally. Increased predictability in terms of possible success of a drug innovation and decreased costs on clinical trials were required to sustain the development of new drugs, he said.