In a bid to meet the shortfall of pharmacy professionals, the National Institute of Pharmacy Education and Research (NIPER) is keen to enter into public private partnership mode by collaborating with academic and R&D institutes in the country and abroad. This initiative, if turns successful, may enable NIPER to cater to the needs of pharma companies.

According to Dr. Prakash V Diwan, project director, NIPER, Hyderabad, the efforts by NIPER will help to provide the required pharmacy professionals. There is a great demand for pharmacy professionals in the country today. The pharmacy colleges lack good teachers and also the faculty is engaged in producing text book experts.

The key objective of NIPER is to enhance professionalism. "Our aim is to bring in a synergy between academic, R&D, technology and industry through the training and exposure. By having a collaboration between pharmacy, biotechnology and information technology, the pharmacy education and research arm is preparing to develop human resources to meet global challenges. We are going all out to prepare professionals to suit to the need of pharmaceutical industry", he added.

"We need to ensure students are exposed to high technology areas like drug discovery, pharmacogenomics, toxicogenomics, RNAi, DNA technology, bioinformatics, drug design and molecular modelling, molecular biology and herbal research, which at the moment are found wanting in terms human resource expertise in the pharma-biotech industry," he said.

In order to keep abreast of the advanced technologies, NIPER is providing training in e-learning to pharmacy teachers, researchers, regulatory officials. The overall game plan is to create a world class institute of teaching and research in the field of pharmaceutical sciences.

Delving into the shortage of pharmacy teachers in the colleges in India, Dr. Diwan stated that even in Andhra Pradesh which has about 200 under graduate colleges does not have adequate pharmacy teachers.

The main reason for this is post graduate pharmacy candidates prefer to work in an industry or R&D centre or even go abroad to achieve the best out of their degree. Pharmacy teaching is the last resort for many and this leads to poor quality of teachers entering colleges to train students.

The situation in most colleges is pathetic in terms of teaching staff. In spite of varied compensation packages like for instance academicians to be encouraged to take up projects from the industries and act as consultants for projects for which they will receive a royalty could prove to be an incentive for them to stick on to the academics, said Dr. Diwan.