An update on Biocon and biosimilars

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Editor's note: Last Tuesday, we wrote on Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and the future of her Bengaluru-based biopharmaceutical company Biocon. If you haven’t read that piece, we’d recommend you do. In that story, we pointed out that Biocon Biologics, the company’s biologic drugs division, is the only Indian company that has permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to sell a portfolio of biosimilars in their country. It also has permission to sell biosimilars in Europe, Japan and Australia. Biocon’s focus on biosimilars over the past decade has now placed it in a prime position to take advantage of one of the biggest global pharma trends, we had written. Biologics are drugs synthesized from biological sources, like animal tissue, rather than chemical drugs, and are becoming increasingly important, particularly in cancer treatments; biosimilars are biologic drugs that have the same effect as an existing, patented biologic drug, similar to how a generic drug is a copy of a patented chemical drug (biosimilars, however, aren’t direct copies). Yesterday, we spoke to Mazumdar-Shaw, who has been re-appointed as the executive chairperson of Biocon for …