Medicine’s Working

After two years at Ranbaxy in Gurgaon, the 50-year-old IIT Mumbai graduate joined hands with Barbhaiya and another scientist, Sanjeev Kaul, who too had tread a similar path, to set up Advinus Therapeutics last year. While Barbhaiya heads the Bangalore facility, Mookhtiar is in charge of its $12-million drug discovery centre in Pune. “From being merely a generic player, where it simply found new ways to manufacture a drug discovered in the US, India is emerging as an important research and development centre with lots of original research happening. This is an exciting time to be here for someone interested in this area,” says Mookhtiar.

Sentiments echoed by chief scientific officer at Eli Lilly, Dr Vinod Mattoo, an endocrinologist who came back to India two years ago from Indianapolis to work at his company’s India centre in Gurgaon. “With the expansion of research and scientific work in India and India’s integration into the global protocol, many scientists in the field — I know about a dozen — have come back to their homeland to lend their expertise and global perspective to the Indian industry,” says Mattoo, referring to the Government’s decision to adhere to the new patent principles as defined by the World Trade Organisation that came into existence on January 2005.

Prior to this, the Indian Patent law of 1970 allowed only process patents not product patents which kept MNCs away.

Other than the opportunity to innovate, what is perhaps also attracting scientists back in droves is that even as biggies like Bayer AG and Merck & Co close down research facilities in the US and UK, it’s India and China to whom they are outsourcing R&D work. As Mookhtiar puts it, “Pharma is the next IT in India. Also now people can look forward to a decent quality of life coupled with a chance to fulfil their ambitions. One can feel the excitement and energy in India.”

It’s also what Kewal Handa, managing director Pfizer calls India’s “unique disease patterns” that is turning the tide in its favour. “The potential to explore your expertise is unparalleled in India. It’s not just third world diseases like gastro or malnutrition malaria that you get to work for but also the so-called Western diseases like diabetes and heart attacks that have grown in the urban pockets,” says Mattoo.

Add to that the projected 10 per cent growth for the Indian pharmaceutical industry over the next three years. And with the pharma SEZs coming up all over, its 50,00,000 people employed in 20,000 firms, you know why the industry ranked as fourth by volume and 13th in value globally, has seen more global transactions in the past year than it experienced in 50 years.