Have firm plans to bring in drugs from global pipeline to tackle India’s NCD challenges: Gagandeep Singh Bedi, AstraZeneca India

British pharma giant AstraZeneca’s India arm plans to introduce drugs from its global pipeline here as it feels the country has a significant unmet need in terms of non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

AstraZeneca India’s Managing Director Gagandeep Singh Bedi in an interaction with Moneycontrol, said the country faces significant challenges when it comes to diabetes or metabolic diseases.

“Indians are dying younger, with cardiac diseases, 10 years earlier than any other country. So, I think those are areas of significant concern and solutions. That, clearly, we have a very strong focus on,” he said.

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Bedi said AstraZeneca wasn’t into providing only drug solutions but also looking at opening a funnel for a journey through awareness, detection to treatment and adherence.

“Our main mainstay of focus in India has been around respiratory, oncology, cardiovascular and renal metabolism. While the pandemic was a big challenge, we still sit on a big endemic of NCDs. And, therefore, our efforts are to really address those significant unmet needs,” he added.

The AstraZeneca India MD said his company collaborated with Sun Pharma for anti-diabetes medication dapagliflozin and will continue to explore more molecules for partnerships.

“The whole objective in these partnerships is to have more and more people being able to access these drugs. So that's where we continue to partner. You need more and more partners to really deliver,” he said.

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On the oncology research and drug development front, Bedi said India was an important contributor to AstraZeneca’s research and development value chain.

“We have a very strong clinical research organisation which continues to partner in India. We work with over 200 sites and with over 42 programmes currently in India. We have 30 oncology clinical trials,” he added.

Commenting on the challenges of pricing for rare disease medicines in India, Bedi said he expects to work very closely with the government, funding groups, patients and the industry to make sure that patients are able to easily access drugs for such diseases.

AstraZeneca acquired the Boston-headquartered Alexion Pharmaceuticals in 2021, giving it an edge in the rare diseases segment.

“We should complement the government with coming out with, you know, their thoughts around the rare disease policy as well as classifying the three buckets on rare diseases—treatable, not treatable, affordable, non-affordable,” he added.

Bedi, whose firm has also invested in biologics and targeted biosimilars, said they are also looking at introducing a significant number of biologics or new biologics molecules.

“Biologics is the real need right now, it can deliver precision-based targeted therapies for patients and that is what we are working towards. In the past three years, we have introduced at least three biologics and moving forward, we are again looking at introducing a significant number of indications for new other biologic molecules, because that is really changing the paradigm of the disease management,” he added.