The Hindu Business Line : Don't focus on US generics market alone, pharma cos told

IBM Life Sciences, the US-based business consulting services major, has cautioned the Indian pharmaceutical companies on their heavy dependence on the US generics market and advised them to change their focus since very few drugs were going off-patent in the post-2010 era.

Addressing the three-day international exhibition and conference on biotechnology titled `Biotec India International-2003' organised by the Biotech Consortium India Ltd and CIDEX Trade Fairs here, the IBM Life head, Mr Peter Brazier, said the Indian pharmaceutical industry could no longer rely on the US blockbuster-based model to sustain growth.

On the blueprint of how the pharmaceutical industry would evolve by the year 2010, Mr Brazier said, "We expect the global pharmaceutical industry to grow at 5.3 per cent annually through 2010, far short of analyst forecasts of 9 per cent." According to him, the pharmaceutical industry would also sell a variety of products and therapeutic healthcare packages including diagnostic tests, drugs and monitoring devices and mechanisms as well as a wide range of patient services by 2010.

He was of the view that the companies that learn how to develop `targeted treatment solutions' would be in a position to deliver greater shareholder returns. They would be able to reduce the time taken from target identification to launch from the current more than 10 years to between three and five years, and even reduce the research and development costs by 75 per cent.

Mr Brazier said the healthcare payers, and not the drug makers, would define the threshold of innovation. Pharmaceutical companies would have to develop `targeted treatment solutions' for patients with specific disease states, rather than making general drugs for patients with similar symptoms but different diseases. He advised the companies to change fundamentally to provide targeted treatment solutions.

"They must move towards a more biological - rather than chemical - means of treating disease. They need to adopt and implement a new way to research and also develop treatments as well as a new sales and delivery model. Targeted treatment solutions are going to be the revenue earners of the future," Mr Peter Brazier said.

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