‘‘India is one of the strategic focus countries and growing market’’

How has the acquisition of Millipore helped strengthen Merck’s position in terms of its portfolio of services for the pharma industry?

Manish Mishra

Merck’s portfolio mainly addresses the demand for advanced excipients and purification media for the manufacture of APIs and biologics in addition to chemicals for analytical purposes. The integration of Millipore considerably expands this offering to innovative and high-end research instruments in cellular analysis, multiplexing, filtration and cell culture solutions. Following a successful integration, the Merck Millipore division earned 2011 global revenues of EUR 2.4 billion.

Which are your flagship products and which segments have registered major growth? How is the company addressing the flowcytometry space? Any upcoming trends in the same?

Our bioscience business unit addresses the needs of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as academia, to understand complete biological systems and identify new therapeutic targets. Key products and services include multiplex instruments and kits, flow cytometry, inhibitors and biochemicals, stem cells, antibodies and reagents, drug discovery and development services and lab filtration.

Lab filtration has been our strong suit where we command 60 per cent market share in the addressable market comprising academia, biotechnology and pharma segments. We have regained our market leader position in the Sterile Filtration Portfolio that mainly caters to the pharma segment. We have also lined up aggressive and ambitious country wide plans for our flowcytometry product offerings. The current market trend indicates an increase in demand for bench top flow cytometry systems that are easy to set up and use. Merck Millipore’s Amnis, is a flow cytometry platform coupled with high resolution microscopy that addresses several unmet needs in the field of cell analysis and systems biology. It complements Merck Millipore’s existing Guava product range. Today there are no comparable alternatives that enable our customers to combine flow cytometry and image analysis in one integrated solution. With the launch of this product, Merck Millipore would become the only provider of this technology.

What are the pressing needs of Indian companies that offer you opportunities for growth? Who are your major clients in India?

Drug discovery companies are always on the lookout for solutions which can accelerate time to discovery. We offer such solutions by leveraging our target profiling services, multiplex and traditional immunoassays, and clinical lab contract services that help these companies prioritise potential drug candidates, screen many biomarkers simultaneously, and conduct research and clinical studies. Consequently, they are fast gaining popularity with customers from pharmaceutical R&D and CROs. Majority of our customers are in the western region, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and some parts of Northern India.

The company is a partner to researchers. Kindly comment.

Our bioscience business unit offers products and services that simplify the work flow for researchers in a wide variety of areas ranging from neuroscience, infectious disease, oncology, and metabolic disorders to stem cells, cell signalling, nuclear function, and chromatin biology. Our flagship products like the Guava and Amnis flow cytometry range are examples of developing tools that ease the research process. Our Immunoassays and Multiplex solutions offer the first-ever, end-to-end workflow solutions for biomarker discovery and analysis. To further strengthen our commitment in advancing life science together with our customers, Merck Millipore India instituted in September 2011 the Merck Millipore India Innovation Awards (MMIIA); a first-of-its-kind, biennial programme aimed at recognising exemplary research undertaken by scientists from government-funded and not-for-profit public research institutes in the field of life science, i.e. green chemistry, medicinal chemistry, chemical and bioanalytics, proteomics, genomics, drug discovery and delivery, biomanufacturing, biomarkers and synthetic biology. The selection criteria are based on the innovation impact level, scientific creativity, industrial scalability and sustainability.

The company has been one of the pioneers of innovation in terms of its products. Tell us about some such products in the market currently or newly launched and their usability.

We have more than 40,000 products and are one of the top three R&D investors in the life science tools industry globally. Our Amicon protein concentrators proved to be game changers for the division when launched and have undergone numerous developments globally based on customer feedback. The range is our premier flagship product that finds reference in thousands of research journals. The newly launched MUSE Cell Analyzer is a miniature table top version of our Guava flow cytometer. With a single laser, it is capable of carrying out more than 10 assays with the intuitive touch screen interface. An experiment time of less than fifteen minutes that includes approximately two minutes of running time; it leads to considerable time saving per assay. Others include Direct Detect, a FT-IR based protein quantification system for accurate protein concentration detection quantitation; and Strat-M, which imitates the human skin for the cosmetic industries, skin bank and research institutes.

How is India as a market? What policies and measures could help the industry?

India is one of the strategic focus countries and growing market for Merck Millipore. It is encouraging to see the Indian government actively support the research community by allocating funds and infrastructure. Having said that, import-friendly customs policies would go a long way in levelling the playing field for international competitors offering quality products, where the price advantage could be passed on to the end-users.

How important is a strong field sales force and technical training?

The Bioscience field force is one of the largest in the country; supported by an expansive product portfolio and a structured distribution network in Tier-I as well as Tier-II cities.Strong synergies between the field force and R&D teams enable us to predict market trends and meet customer expectations, hence sales force should not only be competent enough to discuss these products and services with our customers; but also identify existing gaps. This is achieved by our dedicated training team that focusses on regularly updating the sales team.

What are some of the awaited products and future plans?

One of the much awaited launches in the coming days is Amnis platform. This effectively combines the power of high-end flow cytometry with high resolution microscopy. Additionally, there are a number of launches coming up in the multiplexing and molecular biology kits and reagents. We are now focusing on the development of in-house products and have made sizeable investments at our R&D facility in Bengaluru. Efforts are also on to streamline our supply chain and logistics.

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