How Wockhardt solved a problem Indian pharma couldn't

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Hello folks, you're tuned in to Finshots Daily. In today's episode, we talk about India's first home grown drug and why it took Indian pharma so long to get here.
Before we begin, here's a quick word from Team Ditto.
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Now, back to the story.
India is often called the pharmacy of the world. And there's a good reason for that. If you've ever popped a paracetamol, taken a life-saving antibiotic or received a vaccine, there's a chance it was manufactured by an Indian company. Take a look at what happened when the Novo Nordisk patent for semaglutide expired. Within days, there were at least 15 generics. Generics are simply cheaper versions of the same medicine, made after patent protection expires, and almost nobody else in the world can make them like we do. For context, today, India supplies medicines to over 200 countries, accounts for roughly 20% of the world's generic medicines, and produces more than 60% of the world's vaccines. Which is what makes the next part of the story so surprising. For all our expertise in making medicines, we've rarely been the ones inventing them. Okay, think about it. India is home to thousands of pharmaceutical companies, and some of the world's largest drug manufacturers, and a talent pool that powers research labs across the globe. Yet, very few drugs are discovered and developed entirely in India. But a few days ago, Wockhardt, a Mumbai-based pharma company, became an exception by doing something very few Indian drug makers have done, developing Zainik, a home-grown antibiotic, and earning global recognition for it. A little sidebar here, Indian companies have developed home-grown drugs before Wockhardt, but most stayed largely India-focused and never turned into major global success stories. Take Zydus' Saraglitarazaur, approved in India in 2013
It's often described as the first NCE, that's new chemical entity or essentially a brand new active ingredient, never approved for human use before. Discovered and developed by an Indian company to reach the market. But despite the milestone, it remained largely a domestic story rather than becoming a global blockbuster. Which makes you ask, why did a country that became exceptionally good at manufacturing medicines take so long to create one of its own? The answer lies in a decades-old decision that helped build India's pharmaceutical industry into a global powerhouse. But that same decision may have also made drug discovery one of the hardest bets an Indian company could make. To understand why, we need to go back to 1970 with the Indian Patent Act. At the time, foreign pharmaceutical companies dominated India's drug market and medicines were often too expensive for ordinary Indians. So the government introduced a new patent regime that recognized process patents for medicines. In simple terms, if an Indian company could figure out how to reverse engineer and manufacture a drug, it could legally produce and sell it even if the original molecule had been discovered elsewhere. The policy worked amazingly well. Indian drugmakers didn't need to spend billions discovering new molecules when manufacturing proven ones was faster, cheaper and far less risky. That also meant medicines became more affordable, nurtured domestic drugmakers, and eventually turned India into the world's generic drug powerhouse. If you think about it, this also indirectly gave companies less reason to take on the harder challenge of developing their own drugs. In a way, India's pharmaceutical industry became too successful for its own good. For decades, Indian drugmakers could simply take a medicine discovered elsewhere, manufacture it at scale, sell it at a fraction of the cost, and still make healthy profits. Drug discovery, on the other hand, was a harder pitch to sell to the board and investors. Every rupee they would spend on it is a rupee not spent expanding labs, making new generics or making the current business stronger. In other words, companies must fund innovation by sacrificing profits from the very model that made them successful in the first place. And that's a difficult trade-off. A generic drug can start generating revenue within a few years, but the same can't be said for a new molecule, and that's what makes Wockhardt's breakthrough so interesting. Inventing a new drug today is a little like buying lottery tickets that cost millions of dollars each. Most never amount to anything. Even the winning ones can take over a decade to pay off. On average, pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars and 10 to 15 years bringing a single drug to market, and most still fail.