Indian pharma needs a major R&D-oriented reset

It is time Indian pharma moved up the value chain from producing cheap generics—drugs whose patents have expired and can be made by companies other than their originators and licensees—and started creating new lines of therapy. 

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The industry should come up with entirely new molecules, identify new purposes for old ones, personalize medication at the genomic level, set modern tech-derived protocols and innovate with gene editing. Creating new intellectual property calls for investment, a hardy appetite for risk and the ability to assemble, inspire and deploy talent within an ecosystem that rewards valuable work. Most of all, what it calls for is ambition and the courage to reach above the low-hanging fruit on which our industry has long thrived.

Apart from low costs, India has research talent, a population of vast genomic variety and an intellectual-property regime that is sound in principle, although a bit tardy. This mix calls for entrepreneurial vision, sparks of which had lit up the likes of Piramal and Dr Reddy’s but have been too few and far between.

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Creating new molecules has gone beyond mixing up the contents of different test tubes while holding one’s breath for the result. AlphaFold from Google’s DeepMind has forecast the likely shape of over 200 million distinct proteins using artificial intelligence (AI). Protein molecules interact with one another based on their shape. Alphafold’s database, available free, has eased a path ahead for drug developers. 

The first drug to be synthesized using AI, done by Insilico Medicine for a form of pulmonary disease, is past its early-phase trials. Indian PhDs are relatively inexpensive to recruit than their global counterparts. 

Why shouldn’t Indian pharma players marshal hundreds of them to identify potential targets from the protein database and develop them as drugs for particular diseases? Biologics and biosimilars are exciting new areas of innovation. Identifying new applications for existing drugs is now a challenge of  Big Data, involving an analysis of how people respond to medicines in various ways beyond the intended effects. Semaglutide was originally developed for diabetes, but has stormed sales charts as a weight-loss drug.

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The scope for innovation in pharma is vast. Efforts are on to switch from batch-wise drug-making to continuous production, marking gains of cost and quality. Process innovation had been Indian pharma’s forte before 2003, when product patents kicked in. Aided by tech enablers, the industry can apply similar skills of process redesign to today’s needs, surely. The use of tokens on a blockchain could tackle the menace of fake drugs, a problem that haunts much of the world. 

Also crying out for innovation is the efficiency of drug delivery, whether through skin patches, better inhalers or capsules modified to release dosages at variable speeds. Meanwhile, millions of wearable  devices are picking up vital data in large  volumes that insurers and researchers would love to get their hands on. Clarity on how this data can be effectively used without any privacy violation could open up new prospects too.  

All said, even though a US tariff cloud seems  to hang over generic exports, there’s no dearth of opportunity for Indian pharma.