The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is the country’s top medical research agency tasked with developing new medicines, vaccines, firming up rules around clinical trials, and others. The agency has also been working on some crucial innovations, such as a vaccine against tuberculosis — which is at a late stage of development — and one against HIV. In a conversation with BusinessLine , Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the ICMR and Secretary of the Department of Health Research, talks about how ICMR is hamstrung by low budget and why it is struggling with a lag in translation of its work into real-life tools. Excerpts:

ICMR has been making low-cost innovations in health, such as the glucose strips for testing blood sugar levels. But they are not being marketed. Why?

You are right; there is a gap between translation of innovation from the lab to a properly marketed product. Many of the industries that promote research and development (R&D) are finding this a challenge. Market forces are something scientists don’t understand. You develop something, thinking it should be a very good thing for the market, but it doesn’t work.

We need to learn from these failures and change our strategies. Initially, our strategy was to list all these innovations on our sites, thinking companies would come and bid for it, pay some royalties and start manufacturing. But that hasn’t worked.

Now we are trying to partner with industry bodies which will take the responsibility for taking the best products to market every year. We are hoping some such strategies, where there will be an intermediate linking us to the market, will work. There are also forces from the established players in the market who may not want those low-cost products.

ICMR may be promoting good research, but we don’t have any major publicly-funded manufacturers. Almost our entire immunisation programme is dependent on procurement from private parties. Is that part of the problem?

Yes. We need to develop and support more public sector companies that would take up these innovations on a high-priority basis. Whether it is vaccines, or diagnostics or devices, there should be a pathway for these products. There is a big vaccine manufacturing centre coming up outside Chennai. Right now we have very few viable public sector companies left.

Recently, it was noted in Parliament that very little original medical research was being conducted in India. At the same time, funds are low. How are you juggling these issues?

If you look at the last four years, there has been a 10 per cent increase every year. But if you account for inflation, it has been a static budget, whereas the demand, the responsibilities and the problems are growing.

We have set up whole new networks of centres – multidisciplinary research units, viral diagnostics labs – and they are providing good services. But all this is within the same budget. In real terms, activities have increased, demands have increased and, therefore, the scope for original research is going down.

If we look at budgets of other agencies around the world, you find National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US has a budget of $32 billion. Now, we don’t have to compete with that. But on a per capita basis, our investment in health research is just ₹10 per head per year because our budget is ₹1,000 crore.

Our overall investment in R&D is 0.8 per cent of the GDP, whereas countries like China are investing somewhere close to 2.5-3 per cent of the GDP. Public investment in R&D needs to grow, medical R&D needs to grow, but private sector could also start contributing to health research. So, we are reaching out to a lot of big companies, to ask for contributions through their CSR. Our governing body has approved this. We are working out a policy to make sure there is no conflict of interest.

Are you going to request for a bigger budget?

We are requesting an enhanced budget. We are requesting for double of what we get and are sure we can spend it. We spend close to a 100 per cent of our budget, currently.

What about research at the college level?

There is just so much need to build up bio-medical research capacity in this country. You find most medical colleges don’t do any significant research. For our population, our output in medical R&D is low. We have 400 medical colleges. We should be doing lot more research. But there is no interest, capacity or infrastructure. Even out of the 400 colleges, if we support the top 100 we would see much more research.

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