Ranbaxy

We visited Ranbaxy’s Headquarter in New Delhi on September 12, 2007. We were welcomed by Dr. Gupta and Dr. Virmani.
Dr Virmani gave us a very insightful presentation on Ranbaxy history, vision, and challenges. Dr. Gupta talked about R&D and clinical testing.

Ranbaxy is India’s largest drug developer and manufacturer company with strong international presence at Asia, Europe, US, and Africa. The company was incorporated in 1961 and went public in 1973. Today, Ranbaxy exports its products to 125 countries, has ground operations in 46 counties, and manufacturing facilities in 7 countries. The company’s core competency is in producing a wide range of quality and affordable generic medicines. Ranbaxy is ranked among the top 10 global generic companies and has the goal of ranking in top five by 2012.

Ranbaxy has a ground breaking anti-malarial candidate in phase III trails. This would be the first drug for Ranbaxy and India if it makes it to the market. The main challenge Ranbaxy faces in entering new molecule R&D space is the high cost of moving a molecule from an idea to the market.

India’s pharmaceutical space offers tremendous opportunities to big US and Europe pharma companies by offering cost advantages, skilled labors, and manufacturing competencies. The cost of drug development in India is 1/5 of the cost in US. Another big opportunity is in outsourcing the clinical trials to India. The challenges are finding principal investigators and enforcing the ethical principals that are required for clinical trials.

I was very impressed by Ranbaxy’s vision and pharmaceutical sector growth potential in India. I suspect that there will be more and more clinical trial, research, manufacturing, and documentation outsourcing to India in years to come.






And this is what you have been asking since our Ranxaxy visit.
Reference terms brought to you by POPULAR demand!

Pharmaceutical: companies AKA “drug companies” focus on researching, developing, and manufacturing branded and generic drugs. A drug starts from a molecule discovery, found primarily through trial and error, to treat the symptoms of a disease or illness.
The molecule goes through pre-clinical phase (tested on animals), phase I (tested on small group of patients for safety, toxicity, and tolerance assessment), phase II (tested on a group of patients for efficacy and short-term and long-term side-effects, and phase III (tested on larger group of patients at international level) before a new drug could get final FDA approval to be marketed to public. Examples of branded pharmaceuticals are Pfizer, Roche, and Merck. An example of generic pharmaceuticals is Ranbaxy.

Biopharmaceutical: companies focus on developing large biological molecules known as proteins that target the underlying mechanisms and pathways of a disease. While pharmaceutical companies use chemistry to discover or design primarily molecule for a drug, Biopharmaceuticals develop molecules using technology and living cells such as bacteria cells, yeast cell, animal cells. Genentech and Eli Lilly were pioneers in this space.

Biotechnology: companies focus on discovering methods to manipulate and manage microorganisms or cells and tissues of higher organisms to benefit humans. Biotechnology has been around since 1980s. Biotechnology has applications in four major industrial areas, including health care, crop production and agriculture, non food uses of crops (e.g. biodegradable plastics, vegetable oil, biofuels), and environmental uses. The modern biotechnology has been around only 50 years and focuses on decoding human genome to gain a deeper understanding of the root causes of some diseases and find cure for these diseases. Celera is one of the pioneers in the modern biotechnology space.

Posted By Shabnam Karimi