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I
am assuming that "post-patent scenario" means the
prevalent legal and market scenario after India's change in
patent legislation to comply with WTO guidelines. This response,
therefore, addresses how Indian pharmaceutical companies will
thrive in the coming years and decades, under a new patent
system that now protects products for twenty years instead
of just processes. First of all, products already in existence
should not be affected (in theory) by the new patent system.
Therefore, the Indian pharmaceutical industry should have
a few more years of unencumbered growth, while the major Indian
pharmaceutical companies launch the most recent products that
were available in the world prior to the change in patent
legislation.
Unfortunately,
for the transition to the new patent legislation, India allowed
"mail in" patent applications that have created
legal uncertainty regarding the recent products which could
be reproduced and launched without infringing some patent
that was sitting in a sealed envelope for several years in
a Government office somewhere. India's negotiators should
not have allowed for "mail in" patents during the
transition, as it impeded the Indian pharmaceutical companies
capacity to make well-informed strategic decisions with legal
certainty on which products they could launch. Nevertheless,
I am sure there are many recent products that Indian companies
can launch in order to fuel their growth for the next five
years.
After
this transition period is up, Indian companies will have to
wait for patents to expire, prior to launching products based
on "new chemical entities". To address how this
will affect the growth rate of Indian pharmaceutical companies,
we need to assess how many new products are being commercially
launched per year. |
