NIPER-Pharma Industry meet, Synergy 2018, was held in Hyderabad which emphasized on Role of academia in strengthening of the Indian Pharma and Intellectual Property.

While addressing researchers, GN Singh, Secretary-cum-Scientific Director, Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission said, “Big innovations come from simple ideas, not just infrastructure facilities”.

Industry representatives felt that technology reproducibility was important in the Indian context. Multi-disciplinary research and studies should be encouraged and such research can be enhanced by having industrial collaborations.

It is also important to maintain the purity and health of experimental animals, quality training programmes, good maintenance of labs and animal houses that can lead to and ensure good collaborative research.

The Director of NIPER, Shashi Bala Singh, in her address said the institute was trying to drive basic and translational research by bringing together academia and industry on the same platform. Plans are to extend it to synergy with industries for production and process development.

Rakesh Mishra, Director, CSIR-CCMB, said cell therapy and immunotherapy are ideas that can now replace existing small molecule therapy. The panellists felt that the industry could change tremendously with a strong influence of regulatory aspect on its growth. The Indian industry should rise to the expectations of the US FDA as far as manufacturing units were concerned, they said.

Similarly, speakers felt that investment-oriented thinking of industries and basic research-oriented thinking of academics should resonate in the same frequency in order to bridge the gap and strengthen collaborations.