Experts Point to Avenues for Improvement for India's Lackluster Biotech Sector

Although it is China's economy that more often attracts attention today, India's is no slouch, either. Barely behind its gigantic neighbor to the northeast in terms of population, India stands clearly ahead in terms of a number of other features. While Chinese manufacturers now dominate the high-tech sector, for example, India's engineers have been doing nearly the same on the software side of things for many years already.

In terms of medicine, too, India is, in many ways much more impressive than China is. Whether with regard to credentialed doctors or the kinds of research biologists and chemists who discover new medicines, India is far ahead of China in most of these respects. That is true both in per-capita terms and in absolute ones, an impressive accomplishment given the still-existent, though narrowing, population gap between the two countries.

Even as India seems set to close that gap over the course of the next decade, though, some wonder if it will retain its advantage in terms of medical output and capability. For many years, one of the weakest spots in the Indian environment has been the kinds of small-scale biotech companies that foster so much innovation elsewhere in the world. Resolving this deficit, many feel, could be just what India needs to remain a leader on the world's medical stage while China continues to advance.



That means that experts from all fields have been looking into the problem. Researcher Mark Ahn at http://connect.oregonlive.com/user/MarkAhn/index.html, for example, has published some unique investigations into India's biotech scene, helping to illuminate why some of these small companies thrive while so many fail.

One key point made by Mark Ahn at Oregon Live website is that access to capital seems to be the single most important factor of all. While China's banks, under direct pressure from the country's domineering, ambitious government, are entirely forward about supporting even the riskiest of ventures, India's experience no such motivation.

In reports at Oregon Live Mark Ahn describes how this often means that even those Indian biotech companies that are most pregnant with potential fail because of a lack of funding. While neither Mark Ahn nor any other experts believe it is likely that biotech companies in that country will ever enjoy the easy access to capital that their competitors in China do, this fact points clearly toward a possible improvement. Whether from foreign investors or with initiatives sponsored by India's government, looser lending requirements could potentially shore up this important part of the Indian economy.