Drug Shortage Due To Coronavirus Outbreak
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, an Indian drugmaker, reported a shortage of its hypertension drug, pindolol on Monday due to the unavailability of the drug’s ingredients.
The active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) of this particular drug is not supplied from China, but the supply of some API have been affected by the coronavirus outbreak.
Sun Pharma said in an email that they have enough inventory of API and raw materials for the short term.
The US declared the first coronavirus related drug shortage last week. India is one of the major countries supplying generic drugs to the world, and 70% of the API required for the manufacturing of drugs are supplied from China.
Most of the international businesses dependant on Chinese supplies got disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak. If the epidemic continues, Indian generic drugmakers are expected to face supply shortages.
Sun Pharma said on Monday, “At the moment, we haven’t seen any major disruption in API supplies due to the coronavirus outbreak in China,” without giving much information on why there is a shortfall in pindolol ingredients.
Even though Sun Pharma mentioned that there is a shortage of some APIs due to the coronavirus outbreak
, the company refused to give details about the drugs which are affected.The shortage of pindolol tablets has been mentioned among the lists of shortfalls in supplies of medicines on the FDA website.
Other generic drugmakers in India claim to have API supplies from China, sufficient to run operations up to three months.
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited is a multinational pharmaceutical company that manufactures and sells active pharmaceutical ingredients and pharmaceutical formulations primarily in the US and India. It is headquartered at Mumbai, Maharashtra. Sun Pharmaceuticals provides formulations in several therapeutic areas, such as neurology, cardiology, gastroenterology, psychiatry, and diabetology. It also provides APIs such as etodolac, warfarin, clorazepate, and carbamazepine as well as peptides, anti-cancers, sex hormones, steroids, and controlled substances
