Do you think the pharma industry is leveraging emerging economies such as India and China enough?
People have talked over the past five years about the investment they have put into India and China in research and development (R&D). But if you look at it in totality, it is peanuts. I was at a conference 18 months ago and someone was talking about the great investments they’ve made in China in R&D, it was 200 people — and they said we were the biggest. That’s nothing, just a drop in the ocean. There’s a huge mind shift that’s going to take people from there to really investing big time and I think intellectual property rights (IPR) is an issue. It may just be perception, but if investment in India has to grow, the government will have to convince investors that patents are not a real issue. The law is only as good as the enforcement behind it. The report has also identified drug pricing as a lightning rod. What models could work, given that India is also debating a new drug pricing mechanism? If you look at pricing in individual countries, it comes down to what the government wants
