We have conducted 30 interviews, representing 28 organizations, to understand various factors concerning eHealth in India today. These organizations are involved in designing, implementing or evaluating such programmes or providing relevant technologies. The various types of programmes running...

When a patient is cured by a drug, it decreases the profits of the company that sells that drug. Therefore pharma companies live with a paradox: the more they sell effective medicine, the less there is need for that medicine. There are many reasons that may increase the revenues of a company:...

In drug R&D, there are big challenges today. Big pharma is struggling with a drying up of the pipeline and neglected diseases do not attract much drug development effort. India faces a different challenge not often discussed: it has not yet brought out a single widely used new drug. This is...

The biotech industry in India is becoming better established and companies are being set up at a higher rate now. Through interviews and general knowledge of the local scene, I have identified nine stimuli for biotech company formation in India at present

A recent report in Science states that rotaviruses (the cause of many a diarrhoea) lead to 20–60 deaths a year in the United States and about 600,000 in the developing world. This is one of the many disturbing health statistics that differentiates the developed from the developing world. If we...

India has seen a boom in the incubation of biotech and medtech start-ups in recent years. 397 companies (list provided) have been incubated in 30 such incubators so far. The government plans to establish 50 more of such facilities. The existing incubators are largely under 10 years old, are all...

We have examined all the US patents (444) issued to homegrown Indian pharma and pharma biotech firms. Most (425, 95%) patents are pharma patents not biotech (19). Also, only 11 patents have been cited ten times or more. This data provides one snapshot of the biotech industry in India today. It...

In any assessment of the R&D capabilities of Indian companies, their patent holdings would have to be examined. Here we identify the number of patents assigned by four foreign governments to Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies up to December 31, 2009. It is known that the United...

This analysis looks at the identity of different Indian assignees of 2300 US patents upto 30 June 2009. These patents are classified according to the nature of the assignee, that is companies, government departments and national research laboratories, universities, other non-profit organizations...

Patents are important for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. In order to remain valid, an issued patent has to be ‘maintained’ by the payment of fees to the patent office at three well-defined times over several years. The article examines whether Indian companies in these sectors...