Innovation To Incremental Innovation: Path Redefined
The year 2020 changed the definition and importance of innovations for decades to come. The pandemic taught us the value of quick response and preparing for the future. The last two years have reinforced the need for an overhaul in healthcare, more than ever before. These are times which redefined the importance of innovations to the healthcare industry and also paves the way for adding that incremental value. India has made significant strides by making affordable healthcare accessible to all, however, there are some gaps still remaining in the ‘world’s pharmacy’.
Take, for instance, India has brought down treatment costs of life-threatening diseases such as Hepatitis C to less than five percent of the original cost, but diabetes and cancer medicines continue to be issues for the population. Clearly, even as we look at some piecemeal developments, healthcare needs to prepare for the future with innovations that matter. Innovation is the key pillar of the pharmaceutical industry.
Innovation in pharmaceuticals can be described as a spectrum of research activities directed towards a common goal – increasing therapeutic safety and efficacy. While we often evaluate innovation by examining research and development pipelines for cutting-edge products, it is much more than that.
When researchers and scientists explore and improve radical products considering patients’ needs, we get an adaptive innovation which is also known as ‘incremental innovation’. Incremental innovation aims to provide advanced medicines by expanding therapeutic classes, improving properties of existing medicines, increasing the number of available dosing options and discovering new physiological interactions of known medicines.
Time for India to incrementally innovate
The value of incremental innovation is most evident in those drugs that are on the WHO Essential list. If we glance through the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines 2019, several critical anti-bacterial, cancer and HIV/AIDS follow-on drugs have been added due to their improved safety compared with the first-in-class drugs.
Often, it is through incremental innovations that drugs are adapted to conditions found in different countries. For example, they can ensure heat stability or an increase in the shelf-life of a given medicine to increase effectiveness in diverse environments. As noted by the World Intellectual Property Secretariat, “many follow-on and patented innovations might contribute in a positive way to the improvement of public health and also to economic development, and some forms of adaptive innovation may be especially relevant to meeting neglected health needs.”
Additionally, in case other drugs within the same therapeutic class are withdrawn from the market, alternate medicines developed through incremental improvements increase the security of a reliable supply of drugs, safeguarding patient health.
In India, one in four people have the risk of dying from a non-communicable disease before they reach the age of 70. Similarly, 50 to 80 per cent of people with hypertension and 24 per cent of people with cardiac diseases, fail to adhere to medication. With multiple choices through incremental innovation, patients are more likely to comply with the treatment regimen as they can select their treatment process based on simplified administration. This also enables healthcare professionals to treat patients with sophistication, enhancing patient outcomes.
Another small but important example lies with anti-psychotic drugs. People have faced difficulty in swallowing the large sized tablets of 500 and 1000 mg. For such patients, we now have smaller tablets that facilitate ease of swallowing, thus helping with adherence to the medication.
India as the leading hub of global incremental innovation
All innovation is valuable to the economy and to patients, whether in the form of breakthrough discoveries or incremental innovations. However, we need a more conducive ecosystem to encourage innovation of all kinds.
For instance, as per a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, India’s biotechnology parks are much smaller when compared to those in other countries. The report also throws light on the country’s limited investment into research and development. India invests mere 0.9 per cent of its GDP towards overall research and development.
Moreover, for the country to achieve its vision of Ayushman Bharat, its critical time to strengthen the pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem across various layers. The need of the hour is a strong collaboration between the government, pharmaceutical industry, and academia to work on a policy framework that supports innovation.
Incremental innovation has saved millions of patients suffering from diseases like tuberculosis and malaria and have reduced health care costs significantly. Therefore, now is the time for the country to focus on creating a conducive environment for incrementally innovated drugs to reach patients.
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