PHARMA LITERATI

The New Year promises to be filled with new opportunities for your health system pharmacy to better serve the clinical needs of your patients and the business needs of your pharmacy and hospital. Here are the top five trends we think will have the biggest impact on your health system pharmacy in 2019. In addition to revealing the top trends for this year, let me explain why they’re important for your health system pharmacy and how best to address them to produce the best possible outcomes for you and your patients. 1. Specialty drug spend is growing The number of specialty drugs entering the market will continue to grow in 2019, along with the price of each new drug. Prescribers and patients will expect a seamless experience that begins with your health system pharmacy. Your system will expect you to procure them and have health plans reimburse you for them. You need key relationships in place with specialty pharmacies as you will not be able to procure and dispense limi...

     Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. is the first Indian drugmaker to win an approval to supply a key drug to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in China after the world’s second-largest pharma market asked manufacturers to submit bids to supply commonly used generic medications to hospitals across the East Asian nation.      India’s second-largest drugmaker by revenue bagged the rights to supply Olanzapine in China. Its bid was at a 35 percent discount to the drug’s current prevailing price and it will supply the product to public hospitals in several provinces, including Zhejiang, Hunan and Guangxi, brokerages including Nomura Holdings Inc. and Jefferies Group LLC said citing a media report of Chinese news agency Caixin.      China had rolled out a bulk drug procurement programme to drive down prices and provide better access to quality drugs and treatment to its population. The country is importing more drugs and speeding up appr...

    One of us conducted an informal poll on a social media platform about individual preferences for a particular brand of medicine. Around 70% of responders who lived in India trusted brands prescribed by their doctors while 80% of those who lived in a high-income country voted for cheaper brands recommended by their pharmacists.         The survey results reflect a common – and interesting – perception. Why do Indians not trust a generic alternative to their doctors’ recommendations? In her recent book  Bottle of Lies , the investigative journalist Katherine Eban writes about the startling discovery by an FDA investigator of substandard insulin manufactured by the Indian company Ranbaxy. Dinesh Thakur, a whistleblower at Ranbaxy, exposed the company’s efforts to forge data and dispose evidence to avoid penalties.       Eban describes the utter disregard the company had for the people that consumed these harmful medicines. ...

In order to sensitize stakeholders about the need for a properly-designed Pharmacovigilance (PV) system to monitor Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) will organise a workshop on " Basics of Pharmacovigilance & Establishment of Pharmacovigilance System in Pharmaceutical Industries - A Way Forward " on October 12 at SciTech Centre in Mumbai. It is aimed at establishing safer drug use in the country  This 4th regional workshop is aimed at bringing together regulatory authorities and pharma professionals/experts to discuss the practice of pharmacovigilance in the country. It will also widen the knowledge spectrum of pharma professionals in the field of pharmacovigilance. Professionals in pharmacovigilance, quality assurance (QA) and regulatory affairs (RA) in pharmaceutical companies and healthcare systems are the targeted audience of this workshop. And creation of an agreeable road map for pharmaceutical companies ...

Healthcare industry on 20th September 2019 welcomed the government's decision to slash corporate tax, and said rationalisation of tax structure will provide much-awaited booster dose to the sector. In a major fiscal booster, the government on Friday slashed effective corporate tax to 25.17 per cent inclusive of all cess and surcharges for domestic companies. " Reduction in corporate tax and other relief would create a favourable business climate for the companies which were under tremendous pressure due to several internal and external market forces ," Nathealth President H Sudarshan Ballal said. The apex healthcare industry body believes that the corporate tax reduction move would be supplemented by the Goods and Services Tax (GST) reforms as well. Apollo Hospitals Chairman Prathap C Reddy said: " We heartily welcome the measures announced by the hon'ble Finance Minister today. Corporate India has for long been advocating standardised rates o...

       The blanket ban by AICTE and Pharmacy Council Of India is not applicable to North East and states with less than 50 Pharmacy Institute. The to impose a moratorium was triggered primarily due to the unprecedented applications received by the councils for starting new pharmacy programmes during the academic session 2019-20. Several technical institutes and nursing colleges saw a dip in the admissions. the buildings of these institutes  were used to start pharmacy colleges.        Presently, more than 3000 Pharmacy colleges have enrolled more than 1 lakh students in undergraduate courses, which is adequate to meet the country's need to cater to the global health workforce, as per Dr. Suresh Bhojraj , President of  PCI .. As many as 1400 application were received in 2019-2020 to start new pharmacy colleges of which 842 were granted approvals, with maximum of 541 institutions in Uttar Pradesh . The conditional ban would avoid...

To improve the ultimate health outcomes for patients and enhance their overall experience at all its facilities,  Aster DM Healthcare  is setting up  Aster Innovation and Research Centre  in GCC and India. Over the next three years, the centre will aim to achieve key milestones like the introduction of innovative solutions for home healthcare with a focus on  digital primary care , establishing a rich eco-system of digital health partners from start-ups to academia and starting digital health/ informatics/ medicine as a stream for future healthcare workers. Joining as the Chief of Innovation, Dr Satish Prasad Rath, MD would be spearheading the innovation projects, that will be aiming to leverage the advances in digital health research like AI,  cognitive psychology ,  blockchain , IoT, behavioral economics, etc. and on-board start-ups which can drive innovation. The centre will also work in a collaborative manner focusing on applied rese...

Indian pharma companies now need to increasingly focus on stability studies to prove the safety of formulation till the end of the shelf life. The industry already has three regulations to adhere: Drugs & Cosmetic Rules, US FDA and WHO stability testing guidelines for API, finished drugs and the ICH norms on the same.  The purpose of the stability testing is to provide evidence on how the quality of a drug substance or drug product varies with time under the influence of a variety of environmental factors such as temperature, humidity and light. It also calls for storage conditions, retest periods and shelf life of the products, said B Kumar, deputy drugs controller, sub-zonal office, CDSCO, Bengaluru. In order to ensure that the drug formulations marketed in the country are stable till the end of the shelf life, it is necessary that stability studies should be brought under the condition of license for manufacturing drugs especially in Rule 71, 71-B & Rule 76, he adde...

What does 2019 have in store for Pharma? It was asked to industry Thought Leaders to name one disruptive trend or technology that will have a significant impact on the market in the year ahead. Will pricing pressure lead to a shift in budget management? Is this the year for biosimilar approvals? Will we see continued M&A activity in the sector? From life cycle management to AI, and Supergenerics to digital healthcare, listed are the Pharma and Biopharma trends about 2019. 1. Big Pharma Restructuring will Create Challenges and Opportunities Jim Miller, Former President & Founder, PharmSource 2. Continued M&A in the CDMO and CMO Business Sector Kevin Bottomley, Partner, Results Healthcare 3. 2019: The Year of AI Gunjan Bhardwaj, CEO, Innoplexus 4. A Paradigm Shift in the Management of Pharmaceutical Budgets Maarten Van Baelen, Market Access Director, Medicines for Europe 5. Value Added Medicines: Digital Heal...

Pharma Literati is pleased to announce it's new initiative called Pharma Talks. It is a platform for 'EXTENDED LEARNING FOR THE BUDDING PHARMACISTS' .

India's current research scene is at an inflexion point. Intellectual Property (IP) filing from academia and start-ups are rising and so is the same from med-tech, pharmaceutical corporate research houses, said Dr. Satish Prasad Rath, chief of innovation, Aster Innovation and Research Centre. The country's research activities are in a phase to translate these IPs to sustainable businesses. This can be done through open innovation in collaborative model. The objective is to position ourselves as a potent catalyst in this changing scenario, he added. Some of the visible trends that one sights in this space are newer inventions like affordable cloud, connectivity, Internet of Things (IoT) that are making preventive and out-of-hospital care a reality. It is important to note that it should be technically feasible. Appropriate applications of this will make this a business reality too. So far hospitals have been using the technologies. Going forward, the healthcare sector shoul...