Venus Remedies: Reinventing R&D

“Venus Medicine Research Centre (VMRC) is one of the very few R&Ds in the world working on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) focusing on super bug tackling solutions under patent protection”. Pawan Chaudhary, CMD, Venus Remedies

Contrary to many Indian pharmaceutical companies’ ‘not so R&D friendly’ approach, Venus Remedies has established itself as a successful research-based organisation. Pawan Chaudhary, Chairman and Managing Director, Venus Remedies, started this company with intravenous glucose and saline as its main products in 1989. Chaudhary’s administrative brilliance and leadership qualities were always ably supported by his wife Dr Manu Chaudhary, Joint Managing Director and Director-Research of the company, in all technical and regulatory matters. In 1995, Venus Remedies became a public limited listed company and from then onwards, the company’s approach and focus took a different turn. Today Venus is known worldwide as a research-focused pharma company. The company is known to concentrate on technologically complex products and has developed a niche for itself in injectable segment of the pharma industry worldwide.

R&D is the focus

“The focus of Venus Remedies has always been on the injectable segment of the pharma industry as we found (with the help of market and industry surveys and analysis) that there is a huge unmet gap in the injectable segment which needs to be catered.” Dr Manu Chaudhary Jt. Mng. Director & Director—Research Venus Remedies

Venus is a Rs 400 crore company with 10 high-tech manufacturing facilities at three locations of which eight are in Baddi, one in Panchkula and one in Germany (Werne); an R&D Center, Venus Medicine Research Centre (VMRC), approved by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India (DSIR) located at Baddi campus. The company has a wide international network with 11 overseas offices including the US and Germany. Venus has won over 80 patents for its innovative research products worldwide till date out of its 341 patent basket within a span of just eight years (after WTO).

“VMRC is one of the very few R&D centres in the world working on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) focusing on super bug tackling solutions under patent protection. Venus has a broad range of products catering to critical care segment in parenterals like cephalosporins, carbapenems, oncology drugs in liquid as well as in lyophilised form, infusions and small volume parenterals. The company is present in 60 countries covering more than 75 products under export and registrations through 397 MA granted out of 614 filed,” informs Chaudhary.

If Venus can…

Though Indian population is very much familiar with injectables, tablets and capsules continue to dominate the medicine market. Unfortunately, on the other hand, Indian medicine market has a very few injectable suppliers. Venus’s leadership understood this gap, which might have prompted them to make injectables as their prime domain.

“The focus of Venus has always been on the injectable segment of the pharma industry as we found (with the help of market and industry surveys and analysis) that there is a huge unmet gap in the injectable segment, which needs to be catered. There are hardly any players in industry focusing only on injections like Venus, so we identified injectables as niche where we can make our presence felt,” opines Dr Manu.

The injectable segment is a super specialty segment that demands skilled manpower, high-tech facilities, and innovative technologies/equipments and this is where Venus scored over other players. Dr Manu informs, “We have developed an infrastructure to come up with quality injectables that works instantly on the diseases and provide relief when compared to tablets or capsules.”

According to Dr Manu, conviction is the key to get started with a research driven company. There are basically five factors which are required to establish a research driven company, which are VIBES I.e Vision, infrastructure, budget, energy (passion) and skilled manpower. “We have all the five factors in place and the conviction to use for benefit of mankind,” asserts Dr Manu.

Challenges do not bother or deter the company’s management as they think that they are part and parcel of every business. “What is important is the focus and faith in your vision and the decisions you take in bringing that vision to life. We have kept our vision and missions steer clear from the very beginning and took every step in the direction with all due diligence to come up with revolutionary breakthroughs to serve the mankind,” says Dr Manu.

The manufacturing unit	Venus Medicine Research Centre (VMRC)

Why not others?

For decades, the dearth of R&D activities in India put down to the fact that research on new molecules involved money and risk. However, Venus finds them secondary. Though aware of the possible obstacles, the company was more focused on the positives. With this approach and attitude Venus has enrolled itself in the league of a very few successful R&D-oriented pharma companies in India. India is a pool of brainy scientists, skilled manpower than any other country around the globe. However, according to Dr Manu, where we lack in is the conviction to use the skilled professionals, high-tech and up-to-date infrastructure and funds in the right way to get succeeded.

“Money/ funds obviously play an important role in deciding on to the research driven company or not as the research involves huge amount of money in discovering, developing and taking regulatory approvals for the products. Furthermore, there is no guarantee of success in research. In other words, risk is involved as the success rate to come up with a breakthrough product is very less. Moreover, a clear and defined vision to cater to the unmet medical needs by coming up with such innovative and revolutionary solutions is the main driving force to success,” Dr Manu said while guiding other pharma companies who want to grow big in the field of R&D.

R&D at its best

Venus believes in creating rather than replicating. So, despite the challenges involved in the journey from ‘mind to market’, Venus has not just managed to survive but also consolidated itself as a leading R&D-focused pharma company in India. Venus’s Drug-Protein-Polymer-Conjugate (DPPC) shows its commitment towards R&D. DPPC is one of its kind inventions by Venus.

“DPPC is a novel concept of triple conjugate which employs a protein moiety capable of binding selectively to a particular target site (affected organ), a polymer moiety covalently linked to a protein, and an active drug moiety. This platform technology holds its essence, with its significant potential to conjugate a wide range of drugs (physiochemically different) thereby not only reducing the amount of the drug to be targeted but will also be very cost-effective,” informs Dr Manu.

Venus is confident that this platform technology would bring revolution to the existing target-based therapies, with its pronounced therapeutic efficacy, reduced side effects due to a reduction in dose by four to six times. It would be a life saving drug within the reach of the common man. The drug can be effective in various types of cancers ranging from the most frequent one like breast cancer to rarest ones. As of now, the company has done pre-clinical trials only for various types of cancer.

Avenues for revenues

Venus has generated a revenue of Rs 357 crore in the fiscal year 2010- 11 and Rs 405 crore in the fiscal year 2011-12. The company is exporting around 50 products in various (around 30) countries across the globe such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, New Zealand, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Togo, Myanmar, Jamaica, Iran, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines, Mauritius, Malaysia, the UK, Poland and Kazakhstan

At present, Venus has around 25 products in the pipeline in the various speciality segment like antimicrobial resistance, oncology, cardiovascular and neurology that we focus on and cater to.

And the award goes to…

The work is a reward in itself for Venus. However, till today the company has bagged almost every possible award that was meant for the pharma company. Venus has an unending list of awards which could well be the separate topic of discussion. Venus has received an international award QC-100 TQM (Total Quality Management) in Gold Category in recognition of commitment to quality, system efficiency, leadership, technology and innovation.

The award was given by Business Initiative Directions (BID) International Quality Convention 2011 held in Geneva. Venus has been awarded gold medal in DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Program – 2011, for one of its integrated medicinal research product TROIS. Venus won ‘Company of the Year 2011’ award in the 4th Annual Pharmaceutical Leadership Summit & Award 2011. The company emerged as a winner among the five nominated for this particular award category. Pharmexcil felicitated Venus with patent award in Gold category for the year 2010-11. ‘Annual Report 2011’ of Venus Remedies entered in international arena by winning the LACP’s (League of American Communications Professionals) Global Communications Competition, the ‘2011 Spotlight Awards’ in Bronze category in San Diego, US.

Future perfect

Being a research driven company, Venus is associated with academia and industry players for assistance in few of its projects. “We have tied up with IMTECH, a renowned research centre of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Department of Microbiology, Punjab University to jointly develop a typhoid diagnostic kit for disease detection reduction time from 48 hours to few minutes. We have three more industry academia collaborations,” explains Chaudhary.

Venus’s focus is to increase the revenue mix in favour of research products. Thus, going forward, the company plans to reduce generic products and replace by the research products. “We expect to grow by around 15 per cent in the next two to three years, above the industrial average of 10-12 per cent,” concludes Chaudhary.

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