India’s Vaccines Industry can Grow From $2 bn up to $5 bn by 2026

The report published by Kearney in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry titled “Taking India’s life sciences industry to the global stage”, reported that “India’s vaccines industry can grow from $2 billion to $4 billion or even $5 billion”. This has been made possible by a number of factors prominent being the inclusion of vaccines in the product portfolios of several domestic and global pharmaceutical companies. With the pandemic kicking in 2019 end, the entire world came together to build an effective vaccine to fight against the deadly coronavirus.

This report speaks a lot about the Indian biosimilars and vaccines industries and how it is competing globally and scopes for India in the global biosimilars and vaccines industry. It lays down the challenges faced by the Indian pharmaceutical industry and how we can overcome these. It lays down abundant solutions to the challenges faced and how India can ace the Global Pharma sector and command its worthy position both in terms of volume and value.

Indian Vaccine Industry 

The global Pharmaceutical industry has made vaccines their priority. India commands a massive 40% share of the global vaccine industry by volume. India has been playing a pivotal role in combating deadly diseases for years and now the coronavirus pandemic. India is all set to grow to hold a more significant place in the global pharma industry in the coming years. With the introduction of newer and better technologies such as gene therapies, Ai-based informatics, etc has opened boundless opportunities to conduct research and experimentation and develop innovative and effective medications.

India already possesses a strong local pharma industry, fundamentally strong technical capabilities, and rich scientific acumen, that has helped us emerge as an innovational hub of the world. India is the global supplier of drugs and medicines and everybody prefers India for its low-cost manufacturing processes and affordable drugs.

However, Indian Pharmaceutical Industry still lags behind in terms of the value of our market share through being the third-largest volume producer. India faces several challenges that need to be overcome. COVID pandemic offers a great opportunity for India to take a step ahead to bag the top position both in terms of volume and value.

Massive Scope for Global Vaccine supply

There is abundant scope for the export of COVID-19 vaccines globally to countries unable to manufacture vaccines on their own. Moreover, there are several diseases globally that need vaccination, and these infectious diseases amount to more than 70% of the world population. Many countries rely on India for the supply of vaccine doses to combat various infectious diseases. Our own nation has a huge demand for vaccines owing to the huge population count and prevalence of abundant diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, etc.

India has long been involved in supplying the highly required vaccines to several developing nations at the most affordable prices. So now also the world relied on India for COVID vaccine and India proved to be the biggest exporter of Covid vaccines globally. India itself faced a shortage of vaccines initially due to the heavy burden on the limited resources besides having huge commitments globally. Only two vaccine manufacturers i.e. Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech were operational in the beginning. With limited manufacturing resources, it became difficult to meet both domestic and global vaccine requirements.

This shows the scope for vaccine manufacturing in India provided we develop the required infrastructure and support our pharma medicine developers with the latest and advanced technologies to conduct their research. India requires a favorable statutory and political environment to lead the world with its pharmaceutical products. To be the global leader in terms of value, India needs to be more research-oriented to develop unique formulations to treat health conditions and obtaining Intellectual Property Rights. This is how India can occupy a major pharma share both in terms of volume as well as value.