Cadila, India's sixth-largest drugmaker by sales, spent $250 million developing Lipaglyn, a new chemical entity or new discovery, and aims to spend another $150 million to $200 million to launch the drug outside India.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you're trying to develop a new drug, that costs you a billion dollars to get through the FDA. If you want to start a software company, you can get started with maybe $100,000.
Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will invest more in products that can generate a sufficient return.
If my drug Ragaglitazar had been successful, we would have been getting royalties of thousands of crore rupees every year.
No pharmaceutical company is making money by selling biological knowledge - they make money by selling chemicals. So getting as much of that knowledge as possible into the efficiency of the Web-commerce world is going to make it faster to find those chemicals.
Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.
Our ad campaign with Pfizer is educational. Lipitor is the most widely prescribed drug in the country. For every prescription, there is a doctor writing it. It's a huge vote of confidence.
The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.
We've had a long wrangle with the pharmaceutical industry about parallel imports, and what we were saying is we want to make medicines and drugs as affordable as a possible to what is largely a poor population.
In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.
The pharma industry is one of the few industries that comes up every year and brags about how much worse they got - like, now it costs $2 billion to make a drug, and it was a billion 5 years ago.