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Ranjit Shahani
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The corporate world is a reflection of society. Or is it the other way around is a question I sometimes ask myself. After all, we live in a challenging world where wants have far outstripped needs sometimes driving people to do the unthinkable. The pharmaceutical industry in India, as elsewhere in the world, is going through a particularly trying period. There is a high deficit of trust. Incidents of the recent past have made it even more important for organisations to reinforce ethical behaviour.
If you look at the world around you, you will find that the global economy is not in very good shape. For the pharma industry it is taking ever longer to bring a new molecule to market. The cost of failure has gone up exponentially and with it the cost of success. Governments and payors worldwide are putting ever increasing pressure on the pharma industry to bring down costs. This is indeed a dichotomous situation.
What then can pharma companies do to achieve success? Do they need to relook at their strategies that brought them success in the past? There is no magic mantra but here according to me is what all of us in the pharma industry in India can do to achieve success.
Collaborate for the larger good
The days of individual players leading success are over. The sooner that all stakeholders realise this, the better it will be for themselves and more than that the better it will be for the patient. There are several unmet medical needs and collaboration will help leverage resources for the ultimate benefit of the patient. Countries like ours are in dire need of building and improving healthcare infrastructure. While primary responsibility for this vests with government, various stakeholders could come together to help steer this in the right direction. We need to do this on a war footing or else as I oft say “Even if we were to parachute free medicines in India they would be useless unless we have medical infrastructure in place to diagnose and treat diseases.”
Innovate in all spheres
The pharma market is expected to grow double digits in the next few years and therefore presents an opportunity. India is increasingly getting harmonised with global standards. There clearly exists an opportunity for India to be a hub of innovation but for that to happen we first need to put in place an ecosystem that fosters innovation.
Innovation goes beyond research and development to find new medicines for unmet medical needs. It encompasses everything that an organisation does and could include something as basic as supply chain or delivery systems or even in how an organisation interacts with the medical fraternity. We need to incorporate innovation in our DNA. The Indian pharma industry has made its presence felt as a formidable player on the global map as a maker of quality generics. We are on the cusp of a great opportunity and the time is right to move up the value chain to being a true innovator of medicines to address public health needs. This is what will eventually drive success.
Leverage today for tomorrow
Clinical trials in India have all but come to a standstill given the current scenario in the country. The challenging regulatory environment currently in the country has served to severely impact the clinical research industry with inordinate delays in getting approvals for new clinical trial applications becoming the norm.
Over the last few of years, but more particularly in 2013, the regulators have introduced a slew of measures to improve the overall governance for clinical research in the country. However, there is much more that can and needs to be done, especially in ensuring that these criteria are strictly adhered to and enforced as appropriate.
For too long have we in India relied on clinical trials conducted in other parts of the world to approve drugs meant for use here. We need to recognise that our body systems are different and in this day and age we must but insist that medicines go through local clinical trials. It is good that the Government at all levels recognises the importance of clinical research for the country.
The ability to make available newer treatment options for the average Indian patient in a variety of ailments, including life-threatening indications, depends on the ability to conduct good ethical clinical research in the country.
The future of the industry will depend on how quickly the Health Ministry and the regulators are able to streamline rules and regulations governing clinical research. It is up to the various stakeholders involved to leverage today for tomorrow.
The vexing issue of pricing
Price is an issue that has increasingly plagued the industry in recent times. Never mind if we do not have enough primary healthcare centres in the country or that our ratio of doctors and nurses per 1000 population is poor making the cost of medicines irrelevant when diagnosis and treatment is an issue. It becomes easy to ignore the various factors that are responsible for the poor healthcare of our country and point fingers at the pharma industry. So we have price control in an industry where several companies compete in any case for a single therapeutic area.
And we have talk of referencing pricing against per capita income for patented molecules. Perhaps it is time for the pharma industry to sit back and take stock of its pricing system and together with other stakeholder look at a mechanism where the rich are not subsidised for the poor. Perhaps we need to devise a system that makes it possible to have differentiated pricing while protecting the innovator from parallel trade.
Make reputation the holy grail
Reputation is all there is finally for if you lose reputation everything is lost. It takes years to build a reputation but one solitary incident and a few moments of indiscreet behavior to lose it all. Reputation of the pharma industry is at an all-time low. We as an industry need to rethink our strategy from a reputation point of view. We need to look at how we get back to the position where we are viewed as being in existence for the well-being of the patient. We need to engage more with the media so that we see more positive news flow around all the good being done by the pharma industry. We must remember that the pharma industry is concerned about the health of the nation and is here to stay!
Finally, it all boils down to ethics. So, whether it is about being compliant with the laws and regulations of the land or whether it is about being transparent in its clinical trial processes it is all about ethics.
And this I might add holds true not just for the pharma industry but for all of us. It is just that one comes to expect that little bit more from an industry that touches each one of us in some way or the other. May we live to see the day when the pharma industry thrives in India and we have a molecule that has been innovated in India!