New drug development in the modern age depends on three corner stones, namely, clinical evidence, commercialisation, and physical product delivery, according to Dr J Angus-Bell, General Manager, Quintiles Ltd, Scotland.

Speaking at a symposium on "Current Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences" held in Ahmedabad on January 23 and 24, Dr Angus-Bell explained that drug companies were now focusing first on a particular clinical condition to be targeted by their prospective drugs. This was often the earliest decision that the management of the pharmaceutical company had to make.

The symposium was organised by the Ramanbhai Foundation and was held at the Zydus Research Centre (ZRC), located about 20 km away from Ahmedabad city.

In his presentation, Dr Angus-Bell emphasised that modern drug companies had to operate under increasing pressures of various kinds including greater regulatory demands and controls on pricing.

Hence there had to be much greater interactions than before between the scientific research departments and the commercial or manufacturing side of every pharmaceutical company.

Thus commercial inputs had to begin at the earliest stage of identification of a disease for which the company wanted to produce a medicine.

The next stage was a commitment to a target compound for that disease, followed by the selection of a candidate. At this stage, if the company decided to go through with the Phase III trials, it would have to make a substantial investment. The last stage was the commitment to launch the product.

Earlier, the growing importance of chiral compounds in modern pharmaceutical marketplace was explained by Dr Eric Francotte, the Head of Separation and Cold Metabolism, Novartis Pharma AG.

In an extremely lucid presentation, Dr Francotte mentioned that as many as 55 per cent of drugs in the global market today were chiral compounds and they would probably play an even greater role in the future.

Hence researchers had to devote more and more resources to chiral separation techniques, which had been neglected and ignored in the past.

These techniques could be used to screen compounds that had a wide range of clinical applications from anti-asthma medication to anti-malarial drugs to anti-convulsive therapy.

Inaugurating the symposium on Thursday, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi expressed the wish that soon Gujarat should become a leader in the field of biotechnology, in the same way that Karnataka had taken a lead in the area of information technology.

He impressed everyone with the observation that the name of Zydus Cadila Chairman (Pankaj R Patel) meant the same as "lotus" which was the symbol of Modi's political party (BJP).

Addressing the inaugural function, Pankaj Patel said the company had gone from strength to strength in the past and would continue to maintain a high standard of achievement in the coming years.