New Formula
What is common between Pankaj Patel, Chairman of India's fourth largest drug firm Cadila Healthcare (also known as Zydus Cadila), and other doyens of India's drug industry like erstwhile Ranbaxy's late Parvinder Singh, Dr Reddy's founder late Dr Anji Reddy and Lupin's founder late Dr Deshbandhu Gupta? All of them dreamt of inventing new chemical drugs that would convert their generic drug making firms into original innovator companies like Pfizer, Novartis or GlaxoSmithKline. But that dream has not been fulfilled yet and India's first novel chemical entity (NCE) reaping billions of dollars is still miles away.
Drug discovery has been a tough ride for Indian pharma companies. After Parvinder Singh, sons Malvinder and Shivinder did away with the company's costly and risky new drug pursuit. The same story played out at Dr. Reddy's. Even before Anji Reddy's death, son Satish Reddy and son in law G.V. Prasad had put new drug research programmes on the backburner. At Lupin, founder Deshbandhu Gupta's son Nilesh and daughter Vinita decided to focus on developing specialty drugs and short term big business from the US rather than spend heavily on NCEs.
New drug research is not easy. It not only takes 10 15 years of research but also over a billion dollars to bring the drug to global markets. Millions of chemical compounds have to be screened to identify the molecule and the product can fail at any stage of development. Historically, eight of 10 promising molecules that reach clinical trial stage fail. Adverse events after marketing can also result in the drug being withdrawn.
In 1997, scientists at Dr Reddy's Laboratories in Hyderabad discovered a molecule
