Affordable solutions needed to intensify innovations in Indian pharma sector: DGHS

New Delhi: Advanced, affordable and accessible solutions is the only way forward towards intensifying the innovations in Indian pharma sector, Director General of Health Services (DGHS) Dr Promila Gupta, said.

Speaking at an ASSOCHAM Pharma Conclave 2018 here on Wednesday, Dr Gupta said, “We need to build and develop an enabling ecosystem that unleashes the country’s entrepreneurial energy so that it creates a vast and vibrant marketplace for small, medium and large enterprises which are symbiotically interconnected to deliver superior and sustainable solutions”.

She rued the fact that despite having technical capacity together with vast talent pool and potential, India’s role in new drug discoveries, be it bio-pharmaceuticals or bio-similar, even for country’s own health priorities was quite limited.

There were other factors like changing burden of disease owing to emergence of non-communicable diseases, more chronic diseases, cancerous conditions, lifestyle diseases and India was now said to be on threshold of diabetes capital of the world.

“All these require us to find advanced but affordable and accessible solutions and steer our efforts towards intensifying the innovations in pharma sector,” Dr Gupta added.

She also urged the Indian pharmaceutical industry to take advantage of opportunities that have come up owing to recent revolutions at molecular level, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and imaging technology which had led to advanced research in terms of understanding the underlined mechanism of several diseases.

“I feel that academic institutions, research laboratories and pharmaceutical industry involved in healthcare research, should utilise these opportunities properly and come up in a big way for discovery and development of new medical products and services in the country,” Dr Gupta said.

She also lauded the domestic pharmaceutical industry for playing a crucial role in manufacturing generic drugs which were being exported to about 200 countries as India took care of about 20 per cent of global needs of such drugs.

She, however strongly suggested the industry to shift its approach and put more focus on research and development (R&D) of innovative medical products and services for sustainable growth considering the significant changes in global pharma markets in terms of trade practices, competitiveness, market demands and many other factors.