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As a step towards complementing the first upcoming medical device testing lab of the country at Vadodara, the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Ahmedabad is also planning to evolve itself as a centre of excellence to provide testing infrastructure to the industry. A proposal on the same has been sent to the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) recently.
Plans to develop a testing facility comes at a time when the government has clearly mandated NIPER Ahmedabad to set up a National Centre for Medical Devices (NCMD) in the same campus to provide the much needed skilled manpower to the medical device sector.
Says Dr Kiran Kalia, director, NIPER, Ahmedabad, “In order to develop medical devices sector in the country, NIPER Ahmedabad is also planning to collaborate with leading medical devices manufacturers to develop skilled manpower for the industry who will also be equipped to handle testing modalities. This will drastically reduce our dependence on foreign companies for doing testing of indigenous medical devices.”
High quality and skilled manpower is one of the critical requirements in the pharma sector today. This has gained further impetus as government of India is planning to expand NIPERs across the country to nurture manpower and hence boost domestic manufacturing of medical devices in the country. More than 70 per cent of medical devices are imported as of today which has impacted the development of the domestic industry.
The DoP in the past two years has actively engaged both the NIPERs and the pharma industry to build partnership in areas of education, research and development.
As per official sources, a total of 17 MoUs were signed between seven NIPERs and pharma industry for academia industry linkages recently. Academia-industry linkage is a significant development as one of the critical factors in building innovation ecosystem for medical devices industry.
DoP has identified that academia-industry linkage as a basic requirement for translating research into development (commercialisation) and innovation; and also to fix accountability among the educational institutions. Further in India, the research and development in pharmaceuticals sector is spread across a number of ministries and departments viz., department of biotechnology, department of science and technology, department of scientific and industrial research, health systems research (ICMR) and department of pharmaceuticals.
NIPERs are institutions of national importance set up under NIPER Act, 1998 on the lines of IITs. Presently, there are 7 NIPERs functional at Mohali, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Hajipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Raebareli. One more NIPER at Madurai is being set up. During 2015-16, three new NIPERs were announced for Chattisgarh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
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