6 months ago
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Guna Muppuri, CEO of Indies Pharma Jamaica Limited, says the pharmaceutical company will be concentrating growth efforts outside of its home market this year.
This as Muppuri continues to inveigh against the relatively slow pace of approvals for generic drugs developed by his company.
At year ending October 2024, Indies Pharma grew annual sales revenue by over 10 per cent to $1.16 billion. Profit grew at a more modest 3.7 per cent pace, to $221.18 million. Both top- and bottom-line growth performed well below the 20 per cent target set by the company.
Muppuri cited delays in receiving approvals for generic drugs the company wants to distribute, locally, as the reason for Indies Pharma’s failure to hit its target, a mark he has been hitting in past years.
Notwithstanding the miss, he was defiant.
“My 20 per cent top line and the bottom line was an ultra-conservative statement. If you give me those approvals for whatever we have that is stranded and being strangled, I’ll beat my own records,” Muppuri declared.
He explained that the delays emanated from a change in the regulations, which impacted the application process for drug approvals.
The changes have “negatively impacted the entire industry, not just us”, he said. “If you go and ask every drug company, whether listed or unlisted drug companies, they can share their grief with you.
“When you change the regulations [and] the format of submission of a drug application, all stakeholders must be duly notified. Certainly, we did not get the change of application document for a year or two after they changed it,” Muppuri said, an apparent oversight on the part of the Ministry of Health which only became known in March 2023, two years after Indies Pharma’s initial application.
“What we have done is, from 2021 we prepared some drug dossiers based on the previous application format. We submitted them in 2022; the drug samples, everything. They came back to me in 2024 with their comments,” he explained.
The Ministry of Health has promised to respond to the complaints.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for a generic form Regadenoson Injection last year, the drug is now being manufactured under contract for Indies Pharma by an unnamed company near Delhi in India.
“I will focus my time and energy outside of Jamaica. That’s where my headspace is now …,” Muppuri said.
“We are investing in innovations. We invest in drug cocktails and combinations, where we will create a brand new market that never existed before. We will create the market, we will own it, and we’ll grow with that,” he said.
English (US) ·