India now making moves into pharma innovation

In what must be seen as a significant change in focus, India is now seeing a surge of innovative research in the pharmaceutical and biosimilars sectors, moving away from its traditional role in generics and active pharmaceutical ingredients, reports The Pharma Letter’s India correspondent.

In a major first, a novel patented thrombolytic therapeutic protein drug has been given the go ahead by the Drugs Controller General of India to conduct Phase II clinical trials.

Licensed from India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh (The Pharma Letter March 2, 2009), trials would be conducted to test the efficacy of the clot specific streptokinase (CSSK) in heart attack patients. Nostrum Pharmaceuticals of the USA is the parent company of Symmetrix Biotech, which has been carrying out the clinical development of CSSK.