Ranbaxy Laboratories, India's largest pharmaceutical company, and GlaxoSmithKline, the world's third largest research-based pharmaceutical company after Pfizer and Novartis, announced that they had entered into a drug discovery and clinical development collaboration covering a wide range of therapeutic areas.
"This is the first time that Big Pharma has entered into such an alliance with a company from the developing world. It is a red letter day for the Indian pharmaceutical industry," said Sanjiv Kaul, vice-president (global licensing, corporate affairs and allied businesses), Ranbaxy.
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Several collaborative scenarios are envisaged, with GlaxoSmithKline and Ranbaxy leveraging their respective resources and expertise.
Ranbaxy will be responsible for activities ranging from optimisation of a lead compound to generation of a development candidate. Leads may be provided by either GlaxoSmithKline or Ranbaxy.
For a proportion of the candidate drugs selected within the collaboration, it is expected that Ranbaxy will conduct early clinical work.
GlaxoSmithKline and Ranbaxy will form an executive steering committee to oversee research. Once a compound is selected as a development candidate, in most cases GlaxoSmithKline will complete the development.
It will have the exclusive commercialisation responsibilities worldwide, while Ranbaxy will take the lead in India.
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Ranbaxy, with the consent of GlaxoSmithKline, may co-promote the drug in the US and EU. The financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
Ranbaxy, which is investing $50-60 million in research and development in 2003, and is targeting to have around 1,000 scientists on its rolls by the end of the year, has interests in therapeutic segments like metabolic disorders, anti-infectives, urology and anti-inflammables.
This is Ranbaxy's fourth global collaboration in research and development. It first signed a deal with Bayer for its ciprofloxacin once-a-day, and then outlicensed its benign prostrate hypertrophy molecule to Schwarz Pharma of Germany.
Recently, it replaced Roche as the partner in the Geneva-based Medicines For Malaria Venture for developing a new drug.
"This collaboration provides an avenue to Ranbaxy to leverage its discovery and early product development strengths and gain access to cutting-edge technologies," said Rashmi Barbhaiya, president, research and development, Ranbaxy.
"This agreement furthers our strategy of building strong collaborations in drug discovery while accelerating our internal drug discovery programmes," said Tadataka Yamada, chairman, research and development, GlaxoSmithKline.