India losing out on clinical trial biz pie
India’s standing as an emerging global hotbed for clinical trials of new drugs is clearly on the wane. Given regulatory uncertainty, loss of critical lead time and the perceived risk of data leakage, not only foreign drug majors but even domestic firms are increasingly opting to conduct these trials in other countries.
So much so that there is hardly anyone to bet on high growth of India’s clinical trials market any longer. According to projections made a decade ago, this market was to be around $2 billion by 2010-12, with a growth rate of over 35% between 2006 and 2010. The current market size is just $400 million and the growth is flat, if anything.
Indian drug firms with new drug research programmes such as Sun Pharma, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories and Glenmark are preferring to conduct their early-stage clinical trials in overseas destinations like Canada and European countries — the UK, Netherlands, Germany — and are even exploring opportunities in China, according to industry sources.
This is despite the fact that trials in India are around 40-50% cheaper than in tightly regulated markets such as the US and Canada, and recruitment of patients in trials here is estimated to be four to five times faster. The diversity of India's gene pool used to be another reason touted by analysts who had seen India emerging as a major clinical trial destination.
“We had debated in detail the merits of doing our early trials here. But we decided against it by learning from the experience of
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