Indian biotechnology firms are expected to strengthen their presence in global drugs and vaccines market, perhaps on the same scale as Indian IT firms, says a study released yestwerday by McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health in Toronto, Canada.

Of the 21 Indian biotechnology companies, the report says that India was innovating its way out of poverty and ill health and Indian biotech companies, with their lower manpower costs, were ideally suited to make generic versions of branded products from "big pharma", once their patent cover expires.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, noted that Indian companies were increasingly trying to develop new drugs that could be globally competitive, a development that the established biopharma and biotech companies could not afford to ignore, even though the Indian firms were yet to make landmark product discovery.

However, according to Sara Frew, a co-author of the study, it wasn''t a question of if but when product breakthroughs would start arriving from India.

Moreover, the study pointed out that foreign competitors, who tried to undercut the prices of Indian products such as Biocon''s insulin, had discovered that Indian companies could price their products even lower.

The study noted the 1997 launch of the hepatitis B vaccine Shanvac-B by the Varaprasad Reddy-promoted Shantha Biotechnics (See: Shantha Biotech makes healthcare affordable), which had led to crashing of vaccine prices to about $0.50 per dose from $15 for a comparable imported product.

The Hyderabad-based company''s vaccine now makes up almost 40 percent of hepatitis B vaccines for the UN Children''s Fund (UNICEF), distributed throughout the developing world.

The study also identified the Serum Institute of India as the country''s largest vaccine supplier and exporter, with products sold in 138 countries. The Serum Institute says it is the world''s largest producer of measles vaccines.

The study also said that India had to ensure continued development for the treatment of illnesses ranging from tuberculosis to malaria prevalent in India, even as it sought to expand biotech industry exports.