India to unveil new Pharma R&D policy, incentivise scientists on monetisation

Close on heels of announcing schemes to achieve self-reliance in bulk drugs to avert overdependence on China, the Indian government will shortly unveil a new Research and Development policy that seeks to incentivise the scientists on the monetisation of their innovations.
Announcing this on Wednesday, India’s Pharma Secretary PD Vaghela said the new policy will also insist on globally benchmarking the Research & Development ecosystem by getting rid of archaic laws and rewarding the scientists through industry-academia linkage.

The committee headed by Vaghela to finalize the R&D policy consists of representatives from the Department of Science and Technology and Indian Council of Medical Research, and industry representatives like Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Zydus Cadila chairman Pankaj Patel.

Addressing the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology’s (Hyderabad) 77th foundation day celebrations through a video-conference, Vaghela said the idea behind revamping the R&D policy was to prepare India emerge as pharmacy of the world post-Coronavirus pandemic.

The self-reliance on producing the key bulk drugs, which account for nearly 63% of imports, was also aimed at averting overdependence on one country for 58 critical active pharmaceutical ingredients for the production of essential drugs.

The government has also decided to encourage continued research towards new drug and molecule discoveries and high-end medical devices, and to ensure industry-academia linkage to translate the research into the development and the commercialisation of technologies, said Vaghela.

“Lack of global benchmarking of R&D ecosystem is one of the biggest problems (in India) and our regulations, approval systems, and processes are still very archaic. We need to very closely look at these,” he said, while insisting on coordinated research efforts between various research institutes with increased funding.

Insisting on promoting the scientists with recognition and awards, the Pharma Secretary favoured allowing scientists in the government research institutions to become millionaires by commercializing their discoveries similar to the policies in the developed nations.

Vaghela said the new R&D Policy that the government is going to unveil soon will seek to focus on benchmarking the R&D ecosystem, coordination among research institutes and recognizing scientists.

After a series of brainstorming sessions with the inputs from the industry and academia, the union pharma department under the aegis of the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers has recently announced four major schemes – two each for bulk drugs and medical devices. These schemes, aimed at self-reliance, involve setting up of bulk drugs and medical devices parks with production linked incentive schemes for the promotion of domestic manufacture of key starting materials (KSMs), drug intermediates and APIs, and promotion of the manufacture of medical devices.

The PLI scheme intends to boost domestic production of 41 identified KSMs, of which 29 are chemicals with critical dependence on imports, for which the government was providing financial incentives of Rs 6,940 crore, said Vaghela.

The government is also working on a similar scheme for pharmaceutical formulations, he said, refusing to divulge further details as the details of the scheme were at the infancy stage.

Three large bulk drug parks with a focus on R&D and with centres of excellence will come up in three states, each with an allocation of Rs 1,000 crore from the Centre, based on the competitive land prices and power tariffs to be offered by the states. Already 13 Indian states have submitted their requests and the central government would finalize the locations based on a challenge mode by evaluating the low land and power tariffs and incentives and easy clearances by the states, he said.

The three large challenge mode based bulk drug parks with R&D centres of excellence are in addition to the PLI scheme benefits to help the industry gain an advantage to lower their costs of production and remain competitive by accessing centralised/common infrastructures of the bulk drug parks, said Vaghela.