Innovation In Indian Pharma & Biotech
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Beg Borrow Steal for Innovation in Indian Pharma and Biotech: Discover or Perish in 21st Century Modern DISCOVER Biology.

Guest Author: Ram Ramanujam, Propinquity Therapeutics, Founder- President and CEO, Bangalore, India.

Lord Vishnu assumed a modest posture before Mahabali, I was told by my grandmother. HeInnovation In Indian Pharma & Biotech was not hesitating to beg Mahabali for three steps. Sukrachariar warned Mahabali that any donation would be fatal for him if given to Mahvishnu. As Mahabali was envisioning the chair of Indran and he requested Mahavishnu to intervene, Vishnu begged Mahabali in Vamana Avatar and got 2 Logas in two steps.

In our education system, we have been taught to memorize and return the favor. However, the best education is to know where to look for information and rather not to assimilate the information as knowledge is incremental; where to look aids the improvement of skills and also to retain the information and knowledge assimilated with an analytical mindset.

This has been the root cause of innovation deficiency in the country; the rote learning systems are spoiling the analytical minds, and the services mentality is killing bright skilled individuals opting for cheap labor jobs instead of Discovery.

Cut to the 20th

century Bio story goes that the Japanese invented reengineering in the 20th century, and Germans did better engineering after the second world war, not without hurdles. The pharmaceutical industry is out of the birth of the Chemicals and dyes industry which promoted itself as the antibiotics industry in the 1900s. Later in 1975 emerged, cloning technologies by Cohen and Boyer, and with the emergence of Molecular Biology and Human Genomics, the discovery industry looks very much biological now.

However Indian industry is caught at a crossroads reengineering old drugs that are chemistry-based and have little or any biology in discovery, let alone genomics proteomics or Integrated Omics approaches. This has ramifications for the Indian pharma bio-industry so far, cutting costs and reengineering for the globe in the name of pharmacy of the world. However, LMIC countries do benefit from that approach. Still, Indians are importing MNCs drugs giving exorbitant prices, be it NOVO insulin and CAR T therapy done abroad, although some biology has percolated off late in Indian industry. The point is the adoption of Indian medicines in advanced therapies, including Biologicals, is a rather slow and much-underpenetrated market.

In order to cut costs, Indian companies fight US and EU MNCs in courts, but the real innovation could be much cheaper than litigation. Thus, the beg borrows steal approach is strongly advocated by the author.

Indian Biotech has not seen any discovery since the 1960s and 70s its birth. It’s been copycat all the way. Profits stood in the way of discovering new technologies and drugs.
Stakeholders determined what should be sold in global markets and how much margins would be suitable. People who accessed the capital markets still today have yet to discover NCE or NBE.

The Indian story is suitable here. Either you beg to borrow the competition thru invisible innovation, as Prof Nirmalya Kumar points out in his famous TED talk, or borrow technologies to beat the heat in domestic technologies, steal innovatively not exactly not stealing technologies but to steal their innovative technological ways and means of discovering drugs- India is going to find it hard to Come up with New Drugs in 10 years.

Already many players are venturing into CAR T traditional liquid cancer therapies and Gene Therapies even before the NCE is discovered. Step at a time. Our Cell Gene Therapy is again cloned versions of Western technologies.

ORNA therapeutics technology, for example, is (isCAR) the Breakthrough circular RNA-based technology, whereas ours are 2nd gen liquid cancer therapies. We are yet to find NBE mAb, which is another ten years away. CGT is a very hot RNA therapeutics in a country that has not specialized in Ribozymes, or siRNA, miRNA, and lncRNA are far-fetched. We don’t have a track record of manufacturing large-scale antisense or Modified Phosphorothioates.

Coming back to the point of Beg borrow or steal, which we learned from Dr. Abitha Devi, professors, and students are now worldwide, and to name a few, Dr. PM Murali ABLE, Dr. Raja Genotypic, and myself. During the early 80s, when we did not have a colorimeter in PSG College, our professors taught us how to look, how to learn, and what to look.

The methods of learning and analytics are more important than the learnings in bulk. All of us spent considerable time globally.

You Beg to differ with your Western peers, thats your right. But beg to beat the competition like the Bramhastra that can be used to cut the innovation hurdles that are the need of the hour. Borrowing the tricks of the trade that is required. Stealing the ways and means to edge past the competition in an ethical way is global acumen. Thinking back, I thank Late Professor Dr. Abitha Devi, ex-IISc Ph.D. was a gifted teacher to all of us.

Just take the case of CAR T therapy; we are aware of the fact West is already into Allogenic Therapy like companies Lysengenesis and Allogene. For solid tumors, many advances are made, and CAR T with small molecules is being researched. CAR T with circRNA is the latest kid on the block. lncRNA mechanisms are being explored in CGT.

Ab initio research cutting edge past the peers if not possible by our academia, we should take the Japanese route or the German way. Simple copycats will only see price erosions and poor margins. Discovery today without genomics is simply a man walking without legs. These MNC Pharma M&A these days are at mindboggling speeds. Technologies ranging from Editing DNA to RNA, shooting the messenger to CGT, and RNA Tx are sweeping the Biotech world. Lets us not play catch up as we did in the last 50 years in the next 25 years.

A final note here, innovation and discovery industry spawn discovery academia by funding, and we in the industry are all products of academia. No industry will be equivalent to discovery academia which does research ab initio without expecting results and ends up serendipitously. It creates jobs invisibly. So Dr. Nirmalya was right about invisible innovation, but he forgot about invisible innovation in the industry via academic eureka moments.

Innovation In Indian Pharma & Biotech

Innovation In Indian Pharma & Biotech – Beg, Borrow or Steel for it. Exclusive Article by Ram Ramanujam, Propinquity Therapeutics, Founder- President and CEO, Bangalore, India.

Shekhar Suman is the Co-founder of BioTecNika Info Labs Pvt. Ltd. He is an Entrepreneur, Writer, Public Speaker, and a Motivational Coach. In his career, he has mentored more than 100,000+ students toward success in the Biopharma Industry. He heads the BioTecNika Group, which comprises BioTecNika.com, BioTecNika.org, and Rasayanika.com. An avid reader and listener who is passionate about BioSciences. Today Biotecnika is India's largest Biotech Career portal, with over 5 Million subscribers from academia & Industry. It's ranked among the top 50 websites worldwide in the Biology category.