Bangalore-based pharma marketing and communication services company BioQuest Solutions said it would begin Europe operations in July. Europe is the base of many big pharma companies and the company will also look for an acquisition there, Mr Ashish Dutt, its Director and COO, said.

In the five years since it launched, Europe is its fourth and biggest overseas leap, Mr Dutt said but did not say what it would invest in.

Drug majors have an ever growing “medical outreach” need, he told Business Line . “This year we are entering Europe - Switzerland and the UK to be specific. The region is home to large global pharma companies. We already service the top 25 companies [in reaching out to doctors and patients] and we were doing so for their regional contracts. By landing in Europe, we would be talking global [for them].”

In Europe, it planned to buy a suitable servicing or medico-marketing company. “We are open to inorganic growth and have just opened the space. It could even be a tie-up, joint venture or buying of a stake. We do not have a figure ofinvestment. We may opt for private equity for the inorganic plan.”

From 2008 onwards, BioQuest added a new overseas service each year, from Malaysia, and Singapore to China last year. Even if much of the outsourced work, such as content writing, online information on products and post-launch feedback on drug safety (pharmacovigilance), was done in Bangalore, it was important to place a small set of managers near the client to fine-tune and localise the service.

Being in Europe also meant a price five to eight times better than South-East Asia. The next expansion, he said, would “naturally be the US,” the biggest medicine bazaar.

Drug MNCs, he said, were looking for agencies that offered them outreach services to educate patients and doctors about their products, get market feedback on their new drugs and build brands medically. Outsourcing such non-core activities saved them 15-20 per cent of the cost and went far beyond what routine visits by medical representatives generated.

BioQuest was formed in 2006 by a team that included a doctor (Dr Gautam Sathia, MD & CEO) and Mr Dutt among others. Mr Sanjiv Kaul, Non-Executive Chairman, has personally invested in the company.

The company's 100-odd staff, many of them doctors, pharmacy and marketing specialists, generates content to build client brands and connects with patients and doctors through mobile, phone and web-based information campaigns. Drug makers want to ensure that chronic patients continue to use their products; BioQuest runs patient retention programmes for such therapies.

Mr Dutt said it had worked on cardiovascular, diabetic, gastro-enteric and neurology drugs, OTC (over the counter) nutritional products and pain medicine. One such was GSK Consumer & Healthcare's award winning marketing 2010-11 campaign for Sensodyne.

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