Mr Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Polyclone Bioservices
The shift from Chemistry synthesis approaches to enzymatic routes of API companies will see a major trend in the coming year and some biotransformation, biocatalysis areas will gain more importance and biology on the whole will garner lot of attention in the pharmaceutical industry in Asia Pacific and more so in India.
The year 2014 was the year of learning as Polyclone delved into a new area unexplored before, that is enzyme engineering, and the results have been satisfying and response from the market as well as the industry has been optimistic.
We have proven our technology to our prospects and forged formidable partnerships to bring about the needed transformation to the industry. The idea of actively becoming part of cleaner and greener initiative has been especially inspiring us to move forward aggressively. One of the biggest goals is to showcase the benefit of Insilico enzyme engineering and the possibilities of what computational biology can bring to the table directly benefitting the productivity of the company.
So far, all the work we have done is with customers and confidentiality is maintained; hence for the first-time-starter companies we did not have a demonstrable validated data set and we are in the final stages of the whitepaper preparation which will help companies to understand the significance of in depth understanding of the enzyme's structural behavior in a dynamic environment and assessing the previously ignored quantum mechanics of the enzyme-substrate reaction.
That said, our ambition is to be a significant player in supporting both pharma and non-pharma industries in bringing out more productive biocatalytic assays.
Our primary focus will remain bringing awareness about how enzymatic approaches can be better in the long term and how complex reactions can be simplified. While doing this we will accept challenges to solve previously unaddressed segments of the market and show that we are willing to go the full hog. In summary, the main theme of 2015 will be to 'communicate and share'.
Most SME Pharma companies in India are still traditional in their way of looking at the industry and business, with internet and e-commerce the world has become smaller and competition is no more local. These companies have to shed their fears of the 'New' and embrace technology and imbibe it in their strategy.
The mindset of 'wait and watch' is still at large and being the first mover is seen as a disadvantage. This may not be a strength anymore as capturing markets can be done remotely at relatively lower costs today than 25 years ago. The question is, in comparison to what? However, there is growth overall in the industry, there is optimism in the country and improved governance will create transparency and better healthcare opportunity to the nation will lead to better offerings and a larger marketplace.
But whether India will be seen as a significant player in the technology space is still an open question. More and more investment is going into market capture and scalability and less into real R&D and long term strategy and stability. As long as we celebrate the 'Patent Cliff' phenomena, chances of new technology and new products are diminished.
