Former Ranbaxy executives set up their own venture Bion Pharma in US

NEW DELHI: Five senior executives of Ranbaxy Laboratories’ US arm, who quit last month, have set up their own venture to act as a one-stop shop and offer a comprehensive array of services ranging from securing regulatory permissions to distribution tie-ups for Indian and European drug makers seeking to enter the world’s largest drug market.

The top team of Bion Pharma, the new venture, includes former Ranbaxy US unit CEO Venkat Krishnan, its ex-CFO Gaurav Mehrotra, sales head Bill Winter, legal head Lavesh Samtani and supply chain head Phanindranath Punji. The venture will be based in Princeton, New Jersey, where Ranbaxy’s headquarters too are situated.
They will leverage their experience of spearheading the Indian drug maker’s operations as it encountered a series of regulatory setbacks in America. “The core team collectively possesses more than 10 decades of varied experience and has navigated through some very excruciating circumstances, including enforcement actions, import alerts and other similar hurdles,” Krishnan told ET.

“As a team, we have been instrumental in launching some very large value products in this background and we will bring all these experiences to effectively build the businesses for our partners, helping them learn about every aspect of this market,” Krishnan said.

But he added that his new company will be cautious in selecting its clients. “We will be discriminating in our choice of partners and will only take on players who are willing to follow the rules and meet the expectations of the US market. Our strategy is to have partners with whom we can work on a portfolio of products rather than pick and choose products,” he said.

Over the past eight years, all but one of Ranbaxy’s plants were barred from importing medicines to the US and the company had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars as fines as it pleaded guilty to manufacturing malpractices and other misdemeanours. Amid all its woes, the company also managed to launch the generic version of two blockbuster drugs — Pfizer’s Lipitor and Novartis’ Diovan — under a six-month exclusivity window and operations at the US plant remained functional.

Krishnan said cracking the US market required competence of a different kind and an appreciation of the various stakeholders, such as the regulators, the customertrade channels, and managed care. He added that the company was already in talks with multiple drug makers to bring products from their stable to the US market. Many Indian companies have struggled in the recent past to meet US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) compliance standards.

“These concerns have made customers, retailers, distributors here wary and apprehensive about India-based companies in general and more specifically about new players wanting to enter the US market,” said Krishnan. “Our longstanding relationship with customers can help bridge these gaps of apprehension,” he added. Krishnan said the company would ensure that the FDA was comfortable with the companies they brought to the US market.