The Government is planning sector-based pricing mechanism for different streams of drugs like biosimilars which are getting popular in the country but not governed by the pricing norms that are applicable to the chemical-based drugs.

The Government is also planning to set up a mechanism involving the stakeholders to streamline the issues in the biosimilar sector. The joint body between the government and the industry will meet every quarter to address the emerging issues.

While addressing an industry meet here recently, Joint Secretary in the Health Ministry Arun Kumar Panda gave the indication of introducing a separate price regime for the biosimilars. He also called for fast tracking the biological as done for the generic drugs in the past so that drugs and vaccines could be made affordable.

National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) chairman C P Singh also backed the idea of separate pricing systems. The drugs pricing formula in India is too general under the current regime and needs to be sector-based, especially for fixing prices of biopharmaceuticals, he noted.

He said the government should come out with separate formula for fixing prices of biosimilars within the next five years as the sector would be realizing its full potential by that time. Biopharmaceuticals is a sunrise industry in India with a very few active players. The sector needed to be treated differently to enable India to effectively meet global competition, he said.

The Indian biopharmaceutical sector, valued at US$ 28 billion, was one of the fastest growing knowledge based sectors and was expected to play a key role in shaping India’s rapidly growing  economy by way of producing alternative medicines that are cheaper and qualitatively superior to counter ill effects of growing diseases, Financial Advisor to the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) V K Subburaj said.

Highlighting the need for looking at serious innovation and drug discovery to retain the global competitiveness, he said the DoP was committed to promote this sector to strengthen its research initiatives to produce quality medicines in communicable and non- communicable disease segments.