Vaccines drive pharma boom in Hyderabad

Pharma boom in Hyderabad by Vaccine supplying Pharma majors

With one-third of the world’s vaccine demands among children shipped from its doors in Hyderabad, Genome Valley has emerged as India’s top life sciences cluster, beating Bengaluru and Chennai cities in the game. Touted by many as Asia’s equivalent to the Boston Life Sciences Corridor which is the US cluster is the largest globally, Genome Valley is located roughly 60 km north-east of the Hyderabad city’s thriving IT hub and houses about two hundred major firms that employ more than ten thousand researchers.

Driving this vaccine massive supply are pharmaceutical majors such as Bharat Biotech, Indian Immunologicals Limited, Shantha Biotechnics, and Biological E, among others. And some of the vaccines supplied are Tetanus-Diphtheria, Pentavalent, Rotavirus, Japanese Encephalitis, Hepatitis B&C, and Typhoid Conjugate.

A scientist from Genome Valley said that India contributes about seventy percent of the world’s vaccine requirement. And apart from Genome Valley, the rest of the vaccines are supplied by Serum Institute of India, Pune. It is a limited workforce when it is in comparison to other clusters in India. This is because Genome Valley is a “new cluster that has been “systematically planned to develop new-age solutions to

biotech products” and is not clubbed with pharma and bulk drug industries, as is the case in the other places, he added.

While the last 3 years alone have seen Genome Valley draw investments of about Rs. 6,000 to Rs. 6,500 crore, there is more in the pipeline, said Shakthi M Nagappan the director, life sciences & pharma, of Telangana government. He added that they have also created a company, Life Sciences Infrastructure Ltd, to raise equity funds worth Rs 1,000 crore to support the growth of pharma and life sciences in Hyderabad. The aim is to create assets worth Rs 3,000 to Rs 3,500 crore in the city, he added.

With a string of top-end brands from Switzerland, Canada, and even India like Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Jamb Pharmaceuticals, Syngene International among others making their way into the cluster, authorities are confident of realizing this goal soon.

Genome Valley has added value to Hyderabad and caused a pharma boom in Hyderabad, said Dr. K R Kumar who is the managing director of the Madrid-based drug major, Chemo Formulations, the first Spanish drug company to set foot in India. Its base in Hyderabad city is the only other finished product research and development center, outside of Spain.

In phase two development at Genome Valley, expected to be up and running by 2020, they will go commercial and are also expecting to manufacture five hundred million tablets every year. Also, after the success of oral R&D, they are now planning to bring injectables R&D to Hyderabad, which is only available in Spain now, Kumar said.

Biological E recently launched the measles-rubella vaccine – only the second in the world to develop the product. While it has four facilities at Genome Valley, it is eyeing a further scale-up. The company’s COO, N Laxminarayana attributed the growth to two reasons, a high-quality ecosystem that supports R&D in biotechnology and a talent pool.

He said that high-quality innovation here has led to a reverse brain drain. Unlike earlier, expats are more than willing to return to India.  In his eight-member team of senior executives, three are expats.

Genome Valley, the reason for pharma boom in Hyderabad, has not only attracted innovator companies like Novartis, Ferring, GlaxoSmithKline, and Nektar but also houses global contract research organizations (CROs) and contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs). Among these are Syngene International, Sai Lifesciences, Slayback Pharma, and Lonza. This has created a unique co-location which has now become the USP of Genome Valley, says Vishal Goel, partner, Cerestra Advisors Limited. He has been closely associated with the cluster since its inception in the year 1999.

Buoyed by this success and rush of big-ticket companies into the major city, the Telangana government has green-signaled further development on another two thousand acres of land as part of its ‘Genome Valley 2.0’ initiative. By the year 2021, a fresh supply of 2 million sq ft is expected to be readied at this site that currently has a built-up area of over 3.2 million square feet. Jostling for space here, along with Indian majors are global frontrunners like Novartis, DuPont, Chemo among others, each of them eyeing further expansion. There are also two dozen fledgling firms in its incubators.

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