HYDERABAD: T. Ramasami, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, said pharmaceutical research programme to support affordable human health care was a challenge before scientists .

How to optimise the cost of innovation and drug discovery and migrate from bulk drug producing strength to product innovation process was another issue before the scientists, he said while delivering the founder’s day lecture at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) here on Friday.

Mr. Ramasami said the bulk drug industry of the country, including Hyderabad, had impressed the world. However, the available human health care was not accessible and affordable to many people. He wanted cost of quality health care system to be made affordable through research and development activity.

The R&D should be able to redress health burden in neglected diseases like tuberculosis and malaria.

In making a strong pitch for herbal medicine, Mr. Ramasami felt India should leverage the strength of this system of medicine rather than follow the molecular medicine of the west so as to extend affordable health care. A new language could be rewritten in drug discovery process since the grammar of herbal medicine was different from molecular medicine.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), of which he was the Director General in the past, championed open source drug discovery.

Mr. Ramasami also said India was a rich source of knowledge for drug discovery as it was likely to have considerable number of cases of rare genetic disorders merely because of the size of its population.

While the developed world had eliminated a large number of genetic disorders by prenatal counselling, half of the world’s genetic mutation was still in India.

IICT Director J.S. Yadav introduced Mr. Ramasami.

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