The Untapped Potential of India’s Top CROs and CDMOs
Of the major pharmaceutical companies and top CROs that operate at an international level, many do at least a portion of their preclinical and clinical research in India.
Increasingly, these companies are collaborating with talent in India for new drug development, utilising contract manufacturers for the production of vaccines, proteins, and large and small molecules.
Subsequently, India’s biotech system is becoming an important enabler for new startups early on in their development journey.
In the post-independence era, the Indian pharmaceutical industry developed a strong base for the production of generic drugs.
India’s CROs are considered to be on par with the rest of the world in terms of their infrastructure, research talent, operational processes, and quality control.
Additionally, they are not experiencing the same shortage of PhD-level professionals that the US is currently seeing.
As a result, what Indian companies offer is a larger pool of scientific talent – talent which is being rapidly trained up within CROs to work on a range of research projects for a global selection of clients.
Broad Areas of Research and Specialisation across Top CROs
Many Indian companies have large vivariums, where GLP experiments can be performed on rodents such as humanised mice.
For decades, India has been the largest provider of generic medications to the United States and the rest of the world.
Some potential challenges for the future may include giving traditional medicine a strong scientific base, as well as developing research and a clinical capacity to consistently produce new drugs based on advances in modern biological sciences.
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Still, the pharmaceutical industry in India was valued at USD $42bn in 2021: it was the largest provider of generic medicines by volume, with a 20% share of total global pharmacological exports.
Many of India’s largest pharmaceutical companies manufacture and export generic medicines, and are amongst the largest generic medicines companies globally.
Among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in India, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd is the leading company by market cap as of March 2023, reporting revenues of USD $5.23bn in 2022.
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