Venus Medicine Research Centre (VMRC) has been set up with an investment of $6 million covering an area of 100,000 sq. ft at Baddi in Himachal Pradesh.
To support this state-of-the-art research centre, Venus has three world class manufacturing facilities, one each in Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), Panchkula (Haryana), and Werne (Germany) accredited with national and international certification.
“Our objective is to develop and formulate new and medically required fixed dose combinations, novel drug delivery systems including target based delivery of the drugs, especially for tumours and nanotechnology based products, said Dr Mufti Suhail Sayeed, vice president, R&D, Venus Medicine Research Centre.
It is not just a Research and Development (R&D) unit but a Wealth Creation Centre of the Company, which is approved by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), he added.
Though the current status of R&D in India is amongst the top science based industries of the country with wide range of capabilities in the complex drug manufacturing field and technology. The industry is mounting up the value chain and is shifting its paradigm from a pure reverse engineering industry focused on domestic market to a research driven export oriented industry. In India, the well established companies have successfully shifted their focus from the process of improvisation to drug invention and R&D. Many companies are running their own R&D set-ups and also working in collaboration with leading government research laboratories.
The Government is taking initiatives to support the Indian pharmaceutical industry in every possible way to let it come up as a hub for innovation drugs. Few of the initiatives taken by the government include the availability and accessibility of world class infrastructure, internationally competitive scientific manpower for R&D, Venture Capital fund to boost drug discovery, tax incentives and 100 per cent FDI allowed under the automatic route in drugs and pharmaceutical sector involving the use of recombinant technology, said Dr Sayeed.
Besides this, the expiring patents, R&D cost, and market dynamics are driving the MNCs to outsource both manufacturing and research activities to bring in new opportunities of growth. This path can lead the pharmaceutical industry around the globe to huge success endeavours as R&D is the key to the future of this pharmaceutical industry worldwide.
This recent change in approach has led to shore up growth of not just anti-infectives, analgesics but cardiovascular, oncology, anti-diabetics. Thus we can say that India is in the upward and transitory stage as far as R&D in pharma segment is concerned, he added.