DRL Invests $450M For Drug And Biologics Development
Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories is planning to make a $450 million investment to boost its product portfolio and increase its focus on proprietary drugs and biosimilars.
The Hyderabad-based company will invest around $300 million in its proprietary product portfolio and almost $150 million in its biologics segment. DRL also announced that it will increase its research and development to 10 to 11 percent of sales in the current fiscal compared to 9.4 percent in the last.
Saumen Chakrabarty, president and global head of IT & BPE, DRL, confirmed the amounts and said that the company expects to break even within its biologics $150 million investment and contribute to DRL’s lucrativeness.
The company currently has four assets within its biologics portfolio with several more under development. DRL filed for an investigational new drug (IND) application for its proposed biosimilar rituximab and pegylated filgrastim (peg GCSF) in the U.S. last year.
“On the biologic front, we continue to commercialize our product in emerging market as we progress our pipeline towards approval in the U.S. and Europe. This strategy allows us three advantages. First, the ability to provide improved access to life saving medications for patients in significantly under-served emerging markets. Second, real world experience and data on our products, and third it allows us to capitalize on early revenue opportunities while we make progress on developing our assets for approval in mature markets,” said DRL chairman Satish Reddy.
R&D spending is split between global generics and pharma services & active ingredients (65 percent) and biologics and proprietary products (35 percent). Chakrabarty said, “The increase in spends is because of the movement on clinical files for the two biosimilar products. There are also proprietary products, progress on some of the products. But the biggest increase will also come from the global generics pipeline because there is a mix of complex generics products as well as some external partnerships. So this is a significant increase in our likely spend. So all put together we see quite a substantial increase.”
Reddy said that the company expects the businesses to be self-sustaining after three to four years. The company is currently in collaboration with Merck Serono for the development of the product portfolio.