Integral begins final drug trials for prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s

NOIDA - Integral Bio Sciences, a collaborative life sciences venture among scientists and investors from India and the US, has started the crucial “phase four” trials of original drug discovery to treat prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Joining a handful of companies like Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy’s, Nicolas Piramal and Dabur which are conducting research on original molecules in India, Integral Bio Sciences has also emerged among the front-runners on novel drug discovery in the country.

“If everything goes well, you will see the real product in 2011. We have developed two molecules. Both of them have entered phase four of clinical trials in less than two years,” said Rajendra Jain, chief scientist of the company.

“This feat has also been achieved in a fairly short period of time,” Jain told IANS in an interview.

Prostate cancer is a disease that develops in the gland by the same name in the male reproductive system, while Alzheimer’s is a progressive and fatal brain disorder named after German physician Alois Alzheimer who first described it in 1906.

Sitting at the gleaming laboratory of the company in this Uttar Pradesh town adjacent to the national capital, the US-trained Jain said even though investment in the project was coming from overseas, it was a collective effort of the talent pool available in both the countries.

“In the process, we are also creating a pool of intellectual capital with specialisation in certain fields over a period of time.”

According to Sarvjit Chakravarty, also a US-trained senior scientist who helped incubate the drug discovery model, despite having just 40 scientists working on the projects, the technology adopted was high-end and comparable to similar set-ups in Stanford.

“The model we are following is quite unique. The scientists-to-equipment ratio for us is more than five times better than many companies. This is helping us achieve high quality in short duration,” said Chakravarty.

He said the company was also conducting multi-country clinical trails and remained quite optimistic about a positive outcome in the near future. “I can’t divulge more, but let me tell you the achievement so far has been extremely satisfying.”

Explaining the benefit to India, Sanjai Singh Parmar, operations manager of Integral Bio Sciences, said projects like these will go on to enhance India’s prestige as what they are developing are original drugs.

“We’re into research that can give us patents. It’s not a generic drug out of the patent life cycle which many Indian firms are doing. It’s an original molecule. It will place us in a new league in healthcare — make the recovery process fast and cost effective.”

Ram Thakkar, director of Integral Bio Sciences, said their project was in the domain of focussed contract research.

“What we do will result in real patents. So you can say our process is unique. It’s focused research. It cultivates an intellectual partnership between scientists in India and the US.”

(Prashant K. Nanda can be contacted at prashant.n@ians.in)