The United States Pharmacopeia (USP), an official public standards-setting authority for all prescription and over-the-counter medicines and other healthcare products, is setting up a new facility at the Genome Valley (ICICI Knowledge Park) on the outskirts of Hyderabad with an investment of $15 million (approximately Rs 68 crore).
“The new 110,000-sft building that we are constructing on 4.5-acre land will be our ‘second home’. The completion of the building is expected by the end of April 2011 and we are working out the logistics of the inauguration date, which is likely to take place by the end of August or beginning of September,” V Srini Srinivasan, head (USP international sites and USP global verification programmes, told Business Standard on the sidelines of the ‘Tenth Science and Standards Symposium’ held here on Thursday.
The facility will be the largest site for USP outside the US. It will house analytical research and development, micro-biology, micro-analytical and organic synthetic chemistry labs, besides boosting facilities to conduct training programmes. The organisation has been operating from a 10,000-sft leased space in Hyderabad since the last five years.
Outlining the objective behind expanding its India operations, Srinivasan, who is responsible for USP’s international sites in India, China and Brazil, said India offered a lot of opportunities for USP in many ways. “We started as a collaborative testing laboratory in Hyderabad. It is a service that we want to provide to the USP's headquarters in Washington. But we soon found that the site is beginning to grow on its own. It has gone beyond that today.”
Roughly 35 per cent of the drugs that are imported into the US comes from India. USP's main customers (users) for its reference standards and USP books are all in India, accounting for 10-12 per cent of the organisation's global customers, he said.
Stating that there was a natural synergy between USP and the Indian pharmaceutical industry in the development and establishment of public standards of the latter's drugs, Srinivasan said the organisation was expanding its certification activities in the country, not just for India but also involving several other countries in the world. “Hyderabad will be our central location for providing certification services.”
From 15 personnel five years ago, USP’s Hyderabad site grew to 100 now (excluding the 45 building maintenance staff). With the 110,000-sft facility in place, Srinivasan said, the organisation would grow by an equal number here in the course of one year or so.