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Indian pharma sees next growth phase to be driven by formulation science
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Nandita Vijayasimha, Bengaluru
June 03 , 2026
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Indian pharma is entering a new phase of growth which will be determined less by cost competitiveness and more by advances in formulation science. As pricing pressures intensify in global generics markets and competition continues to rise, companies pay attention to developing differentiated drug formulations that improve efficacy, patient compliance, stability, and delivery mechanisms.
Dr Ankur Shah, chairman & managing director, Invengene said that it was a fact that affordability built Indian pharma. Now access will define its next decade and the two are not the same thing. In complex injectables, access is mostly an engineering problem. A critical antifungal that must be held between two and eight degrees is effectively unavailable across large parts of the world however cheaply it is priced, because the cold chain it depends on simply is not there. A cardiac medicine that must be discarded within hours of a vial being opened imposes a daily cost on every intensive-care unit that uses it. The barrier in both cases is not price, it is design.
This is the case for a new kind of generics that is re-engineered and not merely replicated. The discipline is to leave the active molecule untouched and rebuild everything around it: excipient systems, preservative chemistry, stability profiles, so the product performs in the real world, not just in a controlled warehouse. There is a need to reformulate that antifungal for room-temperature stability and the cold chain disappears. There is a need to extend that cardiac emulsion's in-use stability by several-folds and the waste falls away.
For Indian pharma, this is where the durable advantage lies. Our historic edge making medicines cheaply, at scale is narrowing as other geographies catch up. Formulation intelligence is far harder to copy. A generic that solves a real operational problem competes on clinical utility, supply-chain practicality, not on price alone, and that is a far more defensible position. The shift we must make is from a volume mindset to a differentiation mind-set and to build a professionally governed, process-led organisations that can repeat the result programme after programme, Dr Shah told Pharmabiz in an email.
Scale is decided in the lab, not on the factory floor. The model that works for the world is the one robust prototype, one harmonised dossier filed across many markets at once, manufactured through compliant partners and commercialised by those who know each market best. No single company does all of it. The strength is in matching the right partnership to each stage of a product's life. There is a need to secure long-term commitments early, before the regulatory work is even complete, and a complex pipeline becomes fundable rather than speculative, he said.
The opportunity in front of us is not to make more generic drug copies, more cheaply. It is to change role from competing on price to partnering on capability. This will see the industry move up the value chain, said Dr Shah.
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