Data on clinical trials of genetically-modified brinjal have been made public by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee of the environment ministry.
The WHO feels that the practice is not only against international ethics, but also increases the risk of wrong medication. INNs are names that help to identify the chemical composition of a pharmaceutical substance without having to use long and unwieldy chemical names.
Several Indian states including Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are offering their hospitals to the private sector to manage. This has elicited immediate positive reactions from private sector hospital chains - among them Fortis Healthcare, Apollo Hospitals and Wockhardt Hospitals.
Firm reaches out-of-court agreement on 5 of 19 patent challenges in the US.
While the government expects the new urea policy to bring more investment, the fertiliser industry is less than enthused. New capacities to make urea, industry representatives say, will come up only if adequate fuel and timely payment of subsidy dues is ensured.
Medicine prices in India are set to go up by 1-2 per cent as the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority has decided to permit companies to factor in the rising packaging and processing costs into the retail price. The panel will notify the revised three costs -- for conversion, packaging and packing material -- shortly. The norms were finalised last week after a six-month-long analysis of the market.
With China expected to reopen several hundred bulk drug units after the Olympics, prices of some key bulk drugs, including penicillin and paracetamol, have crashed in the Indian market.
The recent pullout by ICICI Venture and Citigroup Venture from a three-year-old drug discovery partnership with Dr Reddy's Laboratories points to angel investors' growing aversion to risk in pharma and biotech firms, say experts.
Indian fertiliser companies are planning to invest around $5 billion (Rs 21,000 crore -- Rs 210 billion) in overseas joint ventures over the next three years. These companies are in negotiations for 19 such ventures, said government officials. These joint ventures are aimed at sourcing nitrogenous, phosphatic fertilisers and other raw materials.
Move is the first in a series of steps to help pharma industry.
Two United States senators have asked the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) to provide details of market approvals given to all medicines sold by India's largest drug-maker Ranbaxy in that country.
Under fire from some United States senators for allegedly taking lenient positions in granting product approvals to generic companies from countries like India, the US FDA is planning to speed up its plans to set up offices in India by 2009. FDA, in its latest newsletter dated July 21, has said that the agency will set up offices in Mumbai and Delhi to intensify its monitoring efforts.
When Fortis Healthcare wanted heart surgeon Naresh Trehan out of its new acquisition, the Escorts Heart Institute in New Delhi, last year, Trehan's ambitions to set up his own healthcare facility -- Medicity -- was cited as the cause. However, Trehan's plans were not new. Medicity, to be set up in Gurgaon, was first announced in 2005, the year Fortis acquired Escorts Heart Institute. Trehan continued as the Escorts' executive director for two more years.
Under fire in the United States for giving distorted information on the generic drugs it sold, Ranbaxy Laboratories on Tuesday said that it will file all relevant information within a month after which the legal case initiated against it by the US government will be withdrawn.
Anil Nanda, a former member of the governing body of Escorts Heart Institute, today moved an appeal before a division bench of the Delhi high court challenging the dismissal of his petition by the court last Thursday.
The voluntary move comes a little more than a year after the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, the central authority that approves new drugs for marketing, had asked the drug makers to withdraw the 'combination drugs' as they are 'unnecessary' and may pose health hazards. The Drugs Controller General of India had banned 294 combination drugs sold under nearly 1,053 brand names from the market in June 2007.
Facing a steep rise in raw material and interest costs, pharmaceutical companies have sought an increase in prices of regulated medicines, saying otherwise they may be forced to curtail production of certain medicines that have become unprofitable.
Stiff competition in a highly fragmented market has led the domestic drug makers to depend on brand extensions rather than new product launches to corner a market share. A market intelligence study, organised by prescription audit company ORG IMS Health, has found that one in every three brands launched in the country is a brand extension. Such products comprise 18 per cent of the Rs 28,000-crore domestic pharmaceutical market.
Ranbaxy, Cipla and other Indian drug makers are helping US retailer Wal-Mart sell drugs at low cost and boost revenue.
Apart from a five per cent share of the Indian pharmaceutical market, the purchase of Ranbaxy will take Daiichi Sankyo way ahead of others in the race among Indian companies for patent-protected drugs. A recent paper on 'Patenting Landscape in India' by Evalueserve shows that Ranbaxy alone accounts for over 23 per cent of the total medicine patent applications filed by major domestic companies in India.
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