On June 30, India launched a $250-million plan to promote academic entrepreneurship in biopharma and strengthen local manufacturing, the biggest cash injevction into the sector yet. The goal, announced by the government Department of Biotechnology (DBT), is to create “an ecosystem for innovative, indigenous product development” driven by researchers, startups, and small and medium-sized enterprises with equal academia–industry participation, “to make [the] Indian biotech industry globally competitive over the next decade.”

The five-year Innovate in India plan, for which India has taken a $125-million loan from the World Bank, will focus on developing new vaccines, biotherapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices.

The cash injection will build on the nation's incipient biotech industry. DBT secretary Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan says, “The biopharma mission will develop platform technologies in vaccines, drug-discovery and medical technologies in a manner that allows our industry to be truly forward-engineers rather than reverse-engineers.”

The Indian biopharma industry is around 10–15 years behind its counterparts in more eveloped countries and faces stiff competition from China and South Korea. “It is time for India to capitalize now on our unique strengths and overcome any hurdles to ensure success in the biopharmaceutical market,” India's science minister Harsh Vardhan said during the launch in New Delhi. “The program will help deliver six to ten new products in the next five years, create several dedicated facilities for next-generation skills, and hundreds of jobs in the process.”

The Biopharma Mission will be implemented by the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), a public sector enterprise set up by DBT five years ago to act as an industry–academia interface.

The mission will focus on products that are already at advanced stages of development, and on strengthening biotech clusters and clinical trial networks, says Renu Swarup, senior adviser in DBT and managing director of BIRAC. “Apart from vaccines and biosimilars, the five-year mission will also support development of newer platform technologies for medical devices and diagnostics,” she says. “Currently India has only [a] 2.8% share in the global biopharmaceutical market, and the program would elevate this to 5% in [the] next five years.”

Most Indian-made biopharma products are import substitutions or cheaper versions of branded drugs, says Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a biochemist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, who has chaired all the technical committees of BIRAC since its inception. “The new mission is a major step towards promoting indigenous biotechnology products,” he adds.

Vijay Chandru, chairman of Strand Life Sciences in Bengaluru, backs the effort but questions the time constraints. “Five years is pretty compressed time for fresh entrepreneurs to deliver products such as biotherapeutics or new vaccines.”