Day 4: Reverse engineering model mooted for pharma

Mumbai: The CIO roundtable on Healthcare reiterated on the need for an
immediate convergence between IT and biotechnology to tap the $2.84 billion
Indian pharmaceutical market. The near unanimous verdict on the areas of
convergence were: reducing the time for clinical trials to increase ROI,
extensive automation for sales force, mining the vast information repository,
sprucing up the R&D work and to ensure compliance on regulatory issues.



Dr. Ajit Dangi, the Director-General of the Organization of Pharmaceutical
Producers of India (OPPI) felt that today the pharma industry is undergoing a
paradigm shift where there is a need to change the business model from
chemistry-based to cellular-based (biology-based).



"As a result, IT can be increasingly harnessed in the fields of
bio-statistics, bio-informatics, proteomics and genomics." This can enable
Indian companies to tap the $40 billion US R&D market. Consequently, they
can increase R&D spending three times in the next 10 years. One more silver
lining: with patents coming off from 53 of the Top 100 drugs by 2005, the market
is ripe for utilization by Indian companies.



Sachdeva Ramakrishnan, CIO, Dr Reddy’s Laboratory felt that what body shopping
did for the India IT industry a few years back, reverse engineering can today do
for the pharma sector. His advice: the aim should be to have the "India
Inside" tag inside almost every drugs. And IT can help Indian pharma
companies to gain the ingenuity from its own experience to tap the 48 percent
market share US enjoys in the generics market.



Arun Gupta, Sr. Director-Business Technology, Pfizer gave a clarion call to the
IT industry to help increase the efficiency of the much beleaguered medical
representatives. Pfizer had already introduced an Electronic Territory
Management System called OPTIMA that is pushing information on to the medical
map and enable MRs to start e-reporting. He also asked for more introduction of
a CRM solution focused towards doctors and retailers, the primary and secondary
customers.

Mohan Narayanan of Cognizant presented the view point of the IT
industry." The primary need for IT vendors is to gathering more domain
knowledge and use it have domain expertise." And to have regulatory
compliances, he stressed on the need for accountability and privacy of data.

(CNS)