Medicines go short as govt delays approval of proposals

Pharma industry calls on PM to sign summaries sent by drug committee

KARACHI: Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (PPMA) has urged Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to sign summaries sent by the Drug Pricing Committee in 2016 in order to ease the suffering of patients.

“Urging the prime minister to intervene is our last resort or there will be no respite in the near future for patients suffering from acute ailments like Hepatitis C or renal failure,” a press release quoted PPMA Central Chairman Dr Kaiser Waheed as saying.



According to him, about 100 important medicines have gone short in the domestic market in the wake of delay in approval of recommendations sent by the Drug Pricing Committee last year. The PPMA chairman insisted that such matters should have been dealt with by Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap) without sending them to a ministry and later to the Prime Minister’s Office.

The production and availability of a number of life-saving drugs, new and orphan molecules in Pakistan market had been severely affected due to indecision on the part of the prime minister, said Waheed.

For instance, Hepatitis C patients have yet to get access to Daclatasvir, a tablet that contains miraculous cure for people suffering from this fatal disease that was earlier considered incurable.

Waheed recalled that a few months ago a PPMA delegation met President Mamnoon Hussain and urged him to play his role, but he too expressed his helplessness by saying that the pharma industry should start manufacturing essential medicines by incurring losses.

“Medicine producers are commercial and business institutions as they could not manufacture on such a large scale without taking into account commercial viability of their products,” he emphasised.

Waheed pointed out that panel inspection had been made mandatory for the pharma industry, which used to apply to Drap’s registration board for introducing new medicines in Pakistan market. He was of the view that systems like panel inspection would only delay manufacturing and introduction of new medicines.



He claimed that billions of rupees had been lying unused in the Central Research Fund, maintained by the Ministry of Health Services. Pharma companies have been contributing 1% of their gross profit to the fund since 1976 for doing research for the introduction of new medicines.

The industry demands access to this fund for utilising the unused capital for its own growth, especially in relation to export requirements.

Waheed said the government should stop forthwith the “extortion” from medicine manufacturers in the name of research fund, which had been of no use so far.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 20^th, 2017.

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