Sunday, September 25, 2011

Indonesia pharma patents and generic manufacture


The growth of generic pharma drug sales in SE Asia continues, as pricing comes under pressure. Indonesia's government encourages local manufacturing particularly of generics. See earlier post here. But the requirement now is for domestic pharma manufacturing to be 25% locally owned, which forces pharma companies into local JVs. This creates a worry over security of their confidential data.

Now it seems this is being coupled with Ministry of Health restrictions which in essence require local manufacture to be for specified products only. So Pfizer, which is building a new multi million dollar facility to make generics, according to the Jakarta Post does not even know which products it can make yet. It is in discussions with the Ministry of Health, but says it expects that it will receive manufacturing approvals for those products which are near to patent expiry.


In the pharma industry the battle lines used to be clearly drawn between innovators and generics makers. IP Komodo now wonders if future pharma battles in SE Asia will pit innovators against each other over their own generic versions of each others' products.

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