Indigenous manufacturers of human insulin have said that the slashing of prices of imported insulin by multinational companies is a way of putting pressure on the domestic companies which are gearing up to launch their products this year.

While Wockhardt is expected to launch human insulin in June this year, Biocon-Shantha Biotech Ltd, the joint venture company of Bangalore-based Biocon India and Hyderabad-based Shantha Biotecnics, is gearing up to hit the domestic market in October this year.

Earlier this month, multinational companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly slashed the prices of human insulin to bring it at par with animal insulin.

The one third price reduction of the products resulted in the price of one vial of 10 ml being brought down to Rs 145 from the original Rs 218, pegging it at prevailing prices of animal derived porcine insulin in the market.

"We were expecting the prices to fall, but didn't think it would happen this soon," Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson and managing director of Biocon India, said.

"It is a message being sent out to the local manufacturers by the MNCs that they are ready to take the competition head on," she said.

Agreed a senior official of pharmaceutical major Wockhardt, "The prices had to drop this year as domestic players are entering the market."

Meanwhile, the domestic players are devising strategies to capture a fair share of the Rs 200 crore (Rs 2 billion) insulin market.

"We intend to compete not only on the basis of price but also on quality and knowledge," Shaw said.

"We will promote our human insulin as the indigenous product which is comparable in quality to any other multinational's product."

Biocon is also putting in place pathbreaking research data on diabetes to back the product with knowledge about the industry.

"We are getting ready with the human clinical trial protocols which are likely to take place in early March," said Shaw.

"We are working on the validation batches, consistency, product quality and trial data comparability," she said.

The company is hoping to launch the product in October this year. The human insulin market is also set to hot up this year with the launch of the product by two homegrown companies.

The Shantha-Biocon combine has spent close to Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million) on human insulin project. "We are hoping to become a global player in human insulin," she said.

"The company has a capacity to produce 18 million vials of human insulin per annum. We can easily double the capacity as and when required," said Shaw. The company intends to export at least half of what it will manufacture.

"As a greenfield project, the cost of producing human insulin would be in excess of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion)," she said.

The two companies, Shantha and Biocon, intend to market the product under different brand names in different geographies.