The Indian medical diagnostic devices market is mushrooming. The sector is now focussing more on manufacturing than just research and development (R&D).
“In India the manufacturing and localised R&D is being led by Fortune 500 companies, carrying out development work, like GE’s John F Welch Technology Centre (JFWTC), Siemens and Philips. Moreover, companies like Johnson & Johnson (healthcare — IT division), Emageon and others who are looking to garner a major chunk of the untapped market,” said Abhishek Dutta, senior research analyst-healthcare, Frost & Sullivan.
“Most ventures are research and development work to customise products for the Indian market and outsourced manufacturing, in which India is next only to China. At present, core research behind creating and developing the equipment remains limited to the organisation’s headquarters and development centres abroad,” he added.
“In Bangalore, many biotech start-ups are focussing on diagnostic kits and devices for various disease segments. Some companies are into discovery-led innovation and have built up substantial infrastructure and R&D capabilities,” said Shrikumar Suryanarayan, director-general, Association of Biotech Led-Enterprises (ABLE ).
GE does development research pertaining to medical devices at its Indian base John F Welch Technology Center (JFWTC), in Bangalore. On the other hand, among Indian medical device companies, some IT firms, like Wipro, are diversifying into medical diagnostic and monitoring devices, through collaborations.
Wipro has its medical counterpart — Wipro Biomed — which has tied up with GE to develop cutting-edge technology, generate a unique selling price and to build on its brand equity through GE’s prominence in medical industry. One of the present focus areas for Wipro in the medical diagnostics would be telemedicine or telemetry, especially in the diagnostic radiology or imaging.
Manufacturing, research and development are mainly in developing blood diagnostics, diagnostic radiology, patient monitoring, especially multi-parameter monitoring and vital signs, monitoring, diagnostic spectrophotometry and diagnostic chromatography.
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“In addition to big companies, there are a few smaller and emerging technology companies who are mainly stuck in the technology platform and product platform phases, and are awaiting government or venture capital (VC) funding to commercialise their product and enter the market,” said Abhishek Dutta.
“Since, in India, the process of raising VC fund for technology development is not streamlined and raising funding from government is extremely time consuming, these smaller companies are suffering from time lag between development work and market penetration, though the market for their technology or product is ripe,” he added.
However, from an analyst’s perspective, the innovation component behind these technologies is lesser compared to those categories of technology development and product innovations in the US, UK, Japan or Taiwan.