Generic giants to biotech frontiers: mapping India’s pharma trajectory—part I

Abstract The Indian pharmaceutical industry is a large, mature, stable, and expansive global leader, recognized as the “pharmacy of the world.” The industry turns out high-quality, low-cost generic medicines, catering to domestic and international markets. The government of India promotes the development of the industry with a sharp focus on the availability of quality medicines at affordable prices to its people. To maintain and excel from the present performance state, the industry needs to improve its manufacturing base and use and add more generic active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and biotech drugs, including vaccines and biosimilar molecules, in its formulation kitty. In this review, efforts have been made to identify the more vibrant individual manufacturing companies in the country that contribute to more than 90% of the turnover of the production of the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Identifying the key pharma companies can facilitate providing targeted support by the government through policies, thereby strengthening the industry to increase their turnover, supplying quality drugs at affordable prices, and conducting more research and development. Another aspect of the review was to identify the APIs that are being produced in the country, as well as those that are imported, and the need to list the quantum of imports of the APIs so that steps can be explored to get some of them to be manufactured locally by imbibing suitable policy supports.