Indian Pharmaceutical Industry – Move Towards Innovation

Indian Pharmaceutical companies always remains a reason of worst nightmares for multinational companies due to their copycat, imitator image, scientific expertness in reversed engineering and leadership in generic markets, these all leads to number of legal battles between Indian companies and innovative multinational companies in past.
But now a days these legal battles are converting into Collaborations and Partnerships and the reason is single i.e. Indian companies are now more focusing on innovative research.
India joined WTO in 1995, and announced product patent in 2005, ten years down the line as per TRIPS agreement. According to current estimates leading Indian pharmaceutical companies are investing 8-10% of its total sales in Research and Development compare to 2-3% in past. Number of pharmaceutical companies such as Ranbaxy, Dr.Reddy’s & Nicholas Piramal already demerged their R&D operations from their main business to give more focus on R&D.
As innovation pipeline of leading multinational Pharmaceutical companies are shrinking up and cost of innovation for a single molecule is raised up to 1 Billion USD and output is reducing year by year, more and more companies are coming to India to set up their R&D operations.
Indian pharmaceutical industry is waiting for its first NCE (New chemical entity) i.e. Balaglitazone (Co-developed by Dr. Reddy Lab. and Rheosciences) which is expected to hit the market by 2011, at present it is in III Phase of clinical trials.
Ranbaxy labs also successfully completed phase II of Clinical trials for its anti-malarial NCE molecule, and expected to launch it in all emerging markets including India by 2010-2011.
At present near about 26,000 pharmaceutical companies are operating in India, with a total size of about 45,000 crore. One or two potential NCE blockbuster molecule in near future could double the size of Indian Pharmaceutical Industry. Indian Pharmaceutical companies are in full preparation to explode world pharmaceutical market with its NCE molecules and to lead world market.