India’s biopharma moment—If we get the ecosystem right

Government focus on innovation-led growth

Over the past five years, the Government of India has increasingly framed economic growth around innovation. Initiatives such as the Anusandhan National Research Foundation aim to steer research across domains, including healthcare. Programmes such as Atal Innovation Mission, Startup India, and the IndiaAI Mission similarly seek to strengthen entrepreneurship, research capacity, and adoption of emerging technologies.

The biopharmaceutical sector: Challenges and initiatives

Biopharmaceuticals is among the most innovation-intensive sectors. Moving a new drug from discovery to market is high-risk, slow, and capital-intensive—requiring long time horizons, specialised talent, and strong translational capabilities.

Since the 1980s, India has been called the “Pharmacy of the World” for its scale and quality in generics and vaccines. Yet novel drug and vaccine discovery has lagged. In August 2023, the government launched a scheme to promote research and innovation in the Pharma MedTech sector to accelerate investment across the R&D ecosystem.

In the Union Budget 2026–27, the government announced Bio-Pharma SHAKTI (Strategy for Healthcare Advancement through Knowledge, Technology & Innovation), a five-year programme with an allocation of ₹10,000 crore. It aims to strengthen the biologics and biosimilars ecosystem, reduce import dependence, and catalyse a private sector-led innovation environment—supporting the ambition of positioning India as a global biomanufacturing hub. Notably, the recent India Pharma Summit centred around the theme “Discover in India: Leapfrogging Life Sciences Innovation,” reflecting a renewed focus on indigenous drug discovery.

Global trends and India’s position

India ranks 39th in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index 2024, which benchmarks countries across inputs (investment and institutions) and outputs (technology and impact).

The Nature Index 2025, a proxy for research quality and collaboration, highlights the scale of leading ecosystems: eight Chinese universities feature in the global top ten. India’s premier research institution, IISc Bengaluru, is ranked 175th—underscoring India’s opportunity to expand research depth, output, and global influence.

The Nature Index 2025 also places six biopharma companies – Roche, AstraZeneca, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Lilly among the top corporate research leaders. IQVIA’s 2026 reporting notes that ~73 novel active substances (NASs) were launched worldwide in 2025 and projects 65–75 NASs annually during 2025–2029. While leading Indian pharma companies report sizeable pipelines, much R&D remains concentrated in generics, biosimilars, and incremental improvements.

India’s R&D intensity—gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) of roughly 0.66 per cent of GDP—remains low relative to leading innovation economies. South Korea, with GERD above 4 per cent in recent years, illustrates what sustained R&D investment can enable over time.

How can India realise its potential for discovering in India and leapfrogging life sciences innovation? 

To “Discover in India” at scale, the country must pair an India-first innovation agenda with globally benchmarked quality, predictable and world clad regulations, meaningful IP, and faster development cycles. India can also apply the cost discipline honed in generics manufacturing to novel drugs and biologics—driving affordability without compromising ambition.

China is a useful reference point for ecosystem-building. In the last decade it has combined regulatory reform, higher clinical-trial activity, larger R&D outlays, and deeper pools of risk capital with stronger patenting and global licensing partnerships—helping companies move up the value chain in areas such as oncology and metabolic disease.

Five “Pancha Bhutas” can help India make this leap:

1. Reset scientific temper. Strengthen the spirit of inquiry (Article 51A(h)) across education and public discourse, and reinforce evidence-based policy and decision-making.
2. Build job-ready biopharma talent. Modernise curricula for discovery-to-development, regulatory science, quality, and IP, while building specialised skills in platforms such as cell and gene therapy, RNA, radioligands, and AI/ML-enabled drug discovery.
3. Make academia–industry collaboration the default. Expand industry-linked doctoral pathways, strengthen technology transfer, and build clusters around IITs, IISc, and NIPERs with clear, workable IP frameworks that support translation.
4. Catalyse private risk capital for translation. Complement public programmes with conditions that attract venture capital—credible IP, predictable regulation, and strong proof-of-concept—especially in platform areas such as AI/ML, gene editing, mRNA, and synthetic biology.
5. Strengthen IP and strengthening regulatory ecosystem. Bring patent laws in line with international best practices, improve patent quality and timely grant, strengthen enforcement predictability, and consider providing regulatory data protection mechanisms that support innovation. Align India’s pharmaceutical regulations with global standards and establish single-window clearances and regulatory sandboxes for biotech and AI products.

If these fundamentals are built with urgency and consistency, India can complement its manufacturing leadership with credible discovery, faster translation, and globally competitive biopharma innovation.

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