National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has invoked the public interest clause in the Drugs Price Control Order to fix the price of an epileptic drug of Abbott Healthcare, the wholly owned subsidiary of the US pharmaceutical giant which sells the branded generic drugs it acquired from Piramal Healthcare in India.
The country’s drug price regulator has fixed the price of Abbott’s Gardenal Syrup 60 ml at Rs 39.60 and given the company 15 days time to revise its price tag.
The decision was taken after NPPA found the company had increased the price of this medicine by over 10 per cent between August 2007 and August 2008. The regulations allow drug companies to increase the prices of medicines (that are normally out of price control) up to 10 per cent during a 12-month period.
NPPA monitors the prices of decontrolled (non-scheduled) medicines on the basis of data on price available from market research firm ORG IMS. The Authority also revised the prices of five bulk drugs — salbutamol sulphate, spironolactone, pheniramine maleate, chlopropamide and pyrantel pamoate — and announced a corresponding price revision of the medicine packs that use at least one of these bulk drugs as its ingredient. On the whole, NPPA has fixed the prices of 258 medicine packs on March 14.
The authority has also fixed the price fixation parameters for non-PVC bags with oxygen barrier properties. The conversion cost, packing charges, packing material cost and process loss that will be calculated for fixing the prices of such bags will now be known to the industry.