China and India, in 2001 and 2005, respectively, amended their patent laws to comply with the World Trade Organization's Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which bans making generic copies of drugs still under patent protection. The move sparked concerns about the affordability of medicines in poor countries. But Bangladesh, categorized among the world's least developed countries (LDCs) according to the UN, hopes to fill the void—at least for the next five years.

Under the TRIPS agreement, LDCs can make generic versions of patented drugs until 2016. Bangladesh already has an estimated 350 drug companies, from small domestics to large multinationals, which produce 97% of its domestic demand for medicines. However, to make these medicines for domestic use and export, Bangladesh imports 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the chemicals responsible for a drug's action. “That is a weakness, as the imports do not make our pharma industry a fully integrated one,” Abdul Muktadir, secretary general of the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Association of Pharmaceutical Industries, told Nature Medicine.

That could change. In April, Muktadir told an international conference on globalization of pharmaceutical industry in Dhaka that Bangladesh's $31 million API Park in Munshiganj is scheduled to be completed by July 2012. It's a welcome announcement: government red tape and delays in land acquisition have impeded work on the API Park by almost a decade.

The API Park is designed to be a hub for the raw materials needed to make drugs and is planned to house 40 firms that would make 800 to 1,000 types of generic drugs.

Muktadir said five firms have already been cleared by drug regulatory authorities of some developed countries, paving the way for forays into those markets, and are geared to open up in API Park.

The opening of the site could help improve Bangladesh's position in the pharmaceutical market, according to experts. The country is currently hampered by a lagging focus on drug research and production quality, which could improve through technology transfer after the Park comes up, says Mohammad Sayedur Rahman, a pharmacology expert at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University in Dhaka.