The New Realities In Pharma R&D

It is pivotal for India’s pharma R&D playbook to evolve and become more agile and responsive with the help of technology and differentiated strategies to embark on the next phase of growth

- Lakshmipriya Nair

India Pharma Inc is on the cusp of significant change. Its next phase of growth and continued progress is becoming increasingly dependent on the development of innovative and differentiated pharma products, specialty generic complex drugs or biologics and biosimilars across a range of indications. As a result, honing and amplifying its skills and capabilities in R&D has become an exigency for pharma companies to create intellectual property, improve product life-cycle management, and gain cost as well as market differentiation.

In fact, the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) and McKinsey, jointly released a report, ‘The Indian pharmaceutical industry – the way forward’, which outlines that India needs to emerge as an innovation leader by 2030 to gain global leadership in the pharma industry. It states, “We believe the industry can aspire to build a strong innovation pipeline (with three to five new molecular entities launched or in late clinical trial phases and 10–12 incremental innovation launches per year by 2030) and enhance Indian pharma's significance beyond generics, to biologics, new drug development and incremental innovations.” This, in turn, will be one of the crucial steps towards helping the Indian pharma market enter the list of top 5 markets in the world from its current ranking of 11th market by value.

So, it is pivotal for India’s pharma R&D playbook to evolve and become more agile and responsive to new market realities and demands of healthcare across the globe. And, as it undergoes this transformation, the R&D sector will have to relook its strategies and redraw its approaches to standardize processes, ensure functional efficiency and expertise, track key performance indicators across different stages, balance both cost and quality of outcomes, as well as encourage scientific innovation.