Against AIDS: If we don’t make the next generation of innovative drugs ourselves, in 5 years we will be treating our patients with Chinese drugs
“HIV Infection: Transformation of Approaches and Effective Balance” IV All-Russian Congress with International Participation was held on December 19-20 in Moscow at the Analytical Center under the Government of the Russian Federation.
Andrey Ivashchenko, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of ChemRar Group took part in the business program of the congress, during which key representatives of the healthcare system, medical community, specialized technology companies, as well as scientific academic and educational organizations, discussed the directions of system development in the fight against HIV/AIDS, modern approaches in the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases, as well as the growing threats to technological sovereignty in the manufacture of ART drugs and diagnostic test systems in Russia.
Andrey Plutnitsky, Deputy Minister of Health of the Russian Federation, emphasized in his speech: «The National AIDS Service is comprehensively committed to the future, to overcoming HIV/AIDS, based solely on cutting-edge scientifically proven data and solutions. Herewith, we have a big country. And as in any large country, there are many issues that require attention and support from the health care system.
In particular, the participants discussed what drugs will be used to treat HIV-infected patients in Russia in the next 5-10 years, if radical measures are not taken today to create their own development lines for innovative drugs in the country.
As Andrey Ivashchenko noted, today’s Russian pharmaceutical industry exists in a generic model. Thanks to the Pharma-2020 Program, the country’s pharmaceutical industry has emerged – new plants have been built, manufacturers have learned to develop modern reproduced drugs of high quality and bring them to the market. It was as a result of the industry’s groundwork created in the last 10 years that the country was able to provide all the necessary drugs during the Covid-19 pandemic – to quickly create a vaccine, monoclonal antibodies against cytokine storm, to develop its own drugs of direct antiviral action, such as Avifavir® of ChemRar Group. The expert pointed out that only a few countries in the world, such as the USA, UK, China and Russia, have been able to do it. But the created groundwork will be quickly exhausted, as Pharma-2020 Program has been implemented only in the part of generic import substitution, and in the innovative part it was stopped in 2015. Hundreds of projects supported under the program are “put on ice” at the stage of pre-clinical trials, and could have been picked up by the industry and already brought to the market, but they have not even reached clinical trials. There are only a few successful examples of a drug developed with Pharma 2020 support reaching the market. One of them is Elpida® – the best-in-class HIV/AIDS drug, registered in 2017. This year alone, Elpida® and Elpida Combi® have helped more than 120,000 patients. There should have been such domestic innovative drugs in topical therapeutic areas, and there would be much more of them if we had tools to support innovations in pharmaceuticals.
The existing gap between science and industry is a brake on the innovation industry development – it is a lack of funds for developers to undergo late pre-clinics and Phase I — II clinical trials. The program of these stages financing should be seriously expanded to include the development of corporations, including in cooperation with state research organizations, then the flow of innovations can be significantly increased.
Today, most of the domestic budget market in monetary terms is made up of high-margin drugs of Big Pharma, i.e. foreign corporations, which are usually located in unfriendly countries, and the profit from their sale is sent to the development of innovative economies of these countries. It is known that Big Pharma practically does not launch new clinical trials of its innovative drugs of the next generations on the territory of our country starting from 2022, which poses a direct threat to Russia’s technological sovereignty in the field of healthcare. Even if we manage to avoid defects in already registered foreign drugs, in the next 5-7 years our patients will not be able to receive next-generation drugs effective against new resistant forms of infectious diseases, primarily such as HIV/AIDS, severe forms of influenza, hepatitis C, as well as cancer, etc.
As an example of rapid innovative development in pharmaceuticals, Andrey Ivashchenko cited the Chinese industry, where back in 2018 there was a situation similar to the current situation in Russia – academic developments stopped at the laboratory level, own manufacturers were in the generics segment, and innovations came mostly from Big Pharma. “We see that over the last 6-7 years, China has managed to roll out large-scale work and launch more than 4,000 developments that are already in clinical stages and starting to reach the market. For us, it means that if we do not reorient the domestic pharmaceutical industry to an innovative model of development in the next year or two, we will most likely be forced to treat our patients with Chinese innovative drugs of the next generations in 6-7 years. Just as it happened in the automotive industry: in 2022, European brands curtailed local screwdriver assembly and stopped supplying their cars and spare parts to Russia, and in just 1-2 years, our market was filled with Chinese-made cars,” – believes Andrey Ivashchenko, – ”We have successful cases of joint development in Russia with European partners in pharmaceuticals, such as Elpida®, which can and should be replicated, including with developers from China. This is cooperation with partners in the development of innovative drugs: conducting joint pre-clinical and clinical trials and bringing next-generation drugs to the market under their own patents with the division of rights against markets and at the same time obtaining their own development lines, which will allow us not only to compete with Big Pharma, but also to ensure technological leadership in innovative pharma. We have a huge scientific and technological potential for this purpose and available reserves”.
The Congress was organized by: The Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, the Federal Service for Health Surveillance, the Moscow City Health Department, the Moscow City Center for AIDS Prevention and Control of the Moscow City Health Department, and the National Virology Association.
About ChemRar Group
ChemRar Group is one of the largest Russian non-state developers and manufacturers of innovative full-cycle pharmaceuticals. ChemRar Group unites research, manufacturing and investment companies to develop, to manufacture, and to commercialize innovative pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, prophylaxis and new methods of treatment of life-threatening diseases both in Russia and abroad.