India has enough drug stockpile

Have no fear, Hetero is here. This could well be the bottomline of India’s approach to the swine flu. The Hyderabad-based Hetero Drugs is well-stocked with the anti-flu drug Tamiflu that is used to treat Swine flu. Hetero has stocked about 40 million capsules because, as M Srinivas Reddy, Director (Marketing) of Hetero says, a pandemic doesn’t give notice of when it will strike. And so the preparedness to fight it. Already, Hetero has supplied two million doses of the drug out of the nine million order placed by the Central Government.

Hetero is the only Indian company that is a licensee of Roche to manufacture the generic versions of Tamiflu, which it does on the payment of a royalty to Roche, the Swiss pharma company which holds the patent for the drug. Since avian flu caught the world offguard, Roche has authorised drug companies in developing countries to manufacture an inexpensive generic form of its Tamiflu drug called Oseltamivir or Fluvir. Hetero is also licensed to export to about 100 developing countries.

Hetero has been flooded with enquiries about the supplies from countries in Latin America, South-East Asia and West Asia. Hetero supplied 200 million doses of the drug in the last three years within India and rest of the world. While there is no vaccine for the swine flu, the generic drugs have proved to be effective in treating it. Apart from the assurance that the drug supplies are available, Reddy gives yet another assurance. There is no need to worry about the spread of virus in the country, as the virus exists in places where the average temperature is less than 32 degrees.

“As far as our country is concerned, there is nothing to worry because this particular virus, which is causing the disease, can exist only in environments of less than 32 degrees. Considering the way we cook our food, even non-vegetarian people can safely eat meat since our meat is cooked between 40 degree and 70 degrees, where there is no chance of the virus surviving,” Reddy said.

According to research by Roche, Tamiflu has shown to provide up to 89 per cent overall protective efficacy against clinical influenza in adults and adolescents, who had been in close contact with influenza-infected patients. The drug is always kept in stock as part of the disaster management planning by WHO supported by Roche.

Set up in 1993 by V P S Reddy, the Rs 2,000 crore Hetero has emerged as a strong player in pharmaceuticals. Hetero Group was instrumental in successfully meeting the national and international emergencies arising out of Bird Flu outbreak in 2006.