Invited Speaker

Outline of Drug Discovery Partnerships between Western Pharma and Indian Laboratories
Ashis K. Saha
India

Drug discovery is undergoing a major paradigm shift. Faced with the steepest of challenges, the pharmaceutical industry requires far higher research productivity while reducing expenditures for R&D overall. Major patent expiries, a plethora of late stage clinical failures, spiraling costs for drug development, regulatory approvals, launch/marketing etc have all contributed to what has even been metaphorically related to the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. Challenges that life threatening diseases such as cancer and diabetes pose to the world population are surely not going to be met adequately if the endeavor of drug discovery and the associated culture of innovation crumbles like the Titanic. A new paradigm of trust-based partnership between knowledge and expertise centers across all interdisciplinary and intercontinental divides is being built to ensure human health continues to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the likes of histamine blockers, ACE-inhibitors and cholesterol-lowering statins.

India is well known for the strides it made in making life saving medications affordable for the masses. Much of this stride was made through innovative approaches in developing low cost generics and resulting cheaper medicines helped not only the population in India, but have been distributed worldwide. This success notwithstanding, India is sometimes seen as lacking in the type of innovation necessary to create novel new medicines. Neither there appeared to have been a culture of IP protection that provides for the risk-taking of an innovating organization/individual. Much interest was generated for a change in IP protection after India became a WTO member country in 1995 allowing protection of product patent for the first time in India. The intellectual drive for discovering new products is now evident across many Indian laboratories even in organizations that earlier only made copycat medicines. The decades' long strong culture of chemistry in India together with newly established culture of risk taking, IP creation and modern interdisciplinary research are creating a new breed of young scientists satisfied better with intellectual pursuit of drug discovery. Challenges, however, are abundant from the slow pace of changes to workplace ways that sometimes could be seen as counterproductive to creative thinking. Alliances between Indian drug companies and CROs with Western pharma have been abundant in recent years. Such partnerships are likely to bear the first significant harvests from India's labor in drug discovery. The path to the discovery of the drugs of the future will prominently feature energetic collaborations between expertise powerhouses of the West and skilled scientists in laboratories throughout India. In this talk, an outline will be provided on the state of innovative drug discovery in India.