PHARMA’S R&D AMBITIONS GO GLOBAL

India’s life sciences R&D is undergoing a sea change. Given the huge risks and investments involved, can India taste success in innovative medicine, therapy and diagnostic tools?

- JOE C. MATHEW

VISUALISE a honey-like liquid that is colourless and transparent but with one-fifth its viscosity. An eye surgeon removes the cornea and administers two drops into each eye cavity of a corneal blind person. The liquid spreads, solidifies in a few minutes and helps the person grow a new cornea in less than a year. The product, developed by Bengaluru-based Pandorum Technologies, has worked on hundreds of rabbits. The company is planning human clinical trials at Shroff Eye Hospital, New Delhi, and Northwest University Medical School, Chicago. If approved, it will be the first-of-its-kind product, offering hope to 25 million cornea-blind people in the world, say Pandorum’s promoters Tuhin Bhowmick and Arun Chandru.

In June 2021, as part of an early-phase pilot trial, a team of doctors at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, performed India’s first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy using CAR-T cells (which act as a drug and kill specific cancer cells) designed and manufactured by Mumbai-based ImmunoACT, a company promoted by IIT-Bombay professor Rahul Purwar. The company claims that after 13 doses, 50% terminally ill patients suffering from a type of cancer called lymphoma and two children affected by leukemia, another type of cancer, were cured. This could be the first indigenously designed and developed CAR-T therapy, offered at a fraction of what innovators in developed world charge.