CS: I think India can do it. There is no reason why not. Because we have capabilities: we have institutions of high eminence and there is lots of research talent. And, in terms of biology and chemistry, I think India has produced some brilliant scientists. Discovery is an orphan space, across the board, be it in government institutions or in big companies. And there are not many success stories to look at. India has not really made a long-term plan. We’ve kind of lost the game of innovation in terms of drug discovery both for small molecules and for biologics.

Having said that, there are a few success stories that can give us confidence. For example, Glenmark has launched a completely new biological entity, which has been a huge success story. Dr. Reddy’s has had limited success, but drug discovery is on their agenda. And overall, there is growing motivation to get into discovery and development, so that a second wave could be coming. (The first wave referred to is India’s taking the lead in generics). Even our big pharma companies are understanding they’ve got to go beyond generics and re-purposing. One reason why we can be confident of building an ecosystem of discovery is that Indian companies are already one of the biggest supporters of drug discovery in the West. Syngene, Aurigene, Advinas, my company Vipragen, etc. – we have supported almost 250 new products to come to market. So, there is an ecosystem to do that.

CS: We have clients from around the world for whom we offer research services, contract research, where much of the research work is done in India. This is both clinical and pre-clinical. So clearly, we can do it.

LK: Yeah, we can. We’ve been doing it. But who has all the money to put into getting it done? That’s the problem. Usually, one person cannot do it all. One needs an ecosystem that will handle it, as a whole.

CS: Yeah. New biological entities require lots of basic science, and work in identifying new drug targets. Upto the eighties, much of new drug discovery was based on testing active principles identified from traditional medicine or existing drugs. But now we identify how the disease happens at the molecular level, and find specific molecular targets where a drug could intervene in the disease process. This what I mean by research to identify new drug targets.  I think one of the big things that has happened around new drugs and new drug target discovery, both for small molecules and large molecules, is the coming in of AI and machine learning.

LK: Exactly. I was just about to say that we have a new lease of life. It does look like a race where we have fallen behind, but this whole AI thing could flip it around a little bit. So, there are startups, including Glogene, now trying to work with AI-generated models for faster discovery. We have a company at C-CAMP, Peptris, that does a lot of discovery. We have ImmunitoAI, which is doing a lot of AI-based kind of discovery, so I think this whole in silico thing is going to speed up the process. We should use that opportunity, and see if we can get a new lease of life.

CS: I think it might democratise discovery. It may not solve all the problems, but it is a tool that potentially democratises the discovery portion of the process. That is happening.

LK: At the end of the day it’ll bring down the cost of failure. When we say that people spend money on drug discovery, all the expenditure is not in discovering that one successful molecule. It’s also the money put into 500 failures before you get to that successful molecule. AI reduces the cost of failure, in the sense that you can fail faster in silico, on the computer, so your costs are less.

LK: I would like to bring up another issue. A significant problem is that you have to spend a few hundred million dollars on clinical trials to get it through as a novel drug. That places significant strain on the companies trying to do that.

CS: They can be done for much less in India’.

CS: I think we also need to think of the investors’ ecosystem. For the first time I met an investor who said that he wanted to bet on something new. He was willing to invest and wait for an outcome. I think things are changing.

LK: But investors want a blockbuster.

CS: In terms of investment, regarding on-the-ground reality, let’s be very, very frank. Most of the innovation, at least the translation, happens at the startup level, in incubators for instance. There is a fantastic ecosystem. The problem is that startups are not given support in some matters like income tax, where one may face considerable harassment from the IT department, which does not understand the process. I know this since I’m facing a big problem and may have to go to court over the matter.

LK: In manufacturing, you have a reasonably predictable return on investment. You can say, I’m going to make this much of this product, sell so much of it, this will be my profit, and this is how I’ll repay my loan. Whereas in the discovery space, it’s about the risk appetite of the investor. As Chandra mentioned, an investor said, ‘Hey, I want to see a new molecule, I don’t care how much it costs, here’s the money, let’s do our best.’ But that’s a risk-taking kind of investor. I don’t think any bank or private equity firm will put money into that kind of a venture without a clear promise of a return on investment or timelines being met.

This is clearly the case where public funding has to come in, where people will have to take a few of those shots. Governments have taken a shot at it. I think we should have a very rigorous filtering of applicants, but at the end of the day, without very high-risk investments, we’ll not be able to go further.

We need to put together a pathway to new drug discovery, involving steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, where the different kinds of things that need to be done are identified, labs that are needed are there, infrastructure is there. We need to put together a cohort of companies. All this has to be mapped out.

CS: That entire matrix can be filled in completely by Indian firms, Indian academia or Indian incubators. Together, I think we have that entire infrastructure. Yet, we do not have a single entity putting in the money and saying, “Let’s use this infrastructure and create new drugs”. That has to come in. And this is like a moonshot program. For other things, you know, we can have smaller investors, but this is something large. This has to come from the government.

And just to add another point. See, we missed the bus for drug discovery, even with everything we had. What does that mean? We need a booster dose to get back in the game. In the same way that the government has allocated Rs 10,000 crores for biopharma, much of which is going to biosimilars. I think the need of the hour, is a much larger investment in new biologics discovery. Identify the areas we want to work on. Biologics, certain areas of vaccine, other biological products etc. We are actually doing well in vaccines. But innovation requires big money. I want to see the Government of India announcing $5 billion for innovation. And if there’s a government announcement that $5 billion is being put into innovation, I tell you an equal amount of money will come from other sources, from India, from the Gulf, from the West. But that kind of commitment is needed. We are spending peanuts on research and development (R&D). You can’t expect something to happen without spending much more on R&D.