Eighteen Years From a Chennai Bench to a Marketed Drug
At Biotech Conclave 2026 in Chennai, panellists put a real number on India's biopharma ambition and named the gap between academic research and manufacturing that neither side currently owns.
At the Biotech Conclave 2026 in Chennai, presented by VIT Chennai in association with The Hindu, a panel on India as a global biopharma hub did something unusual for an industry event. It put the real timeline on the table.
The number
Maneesh Paul, CEO of Microvioma and lead co-inventor of the anti-infective enmetazobactam at Orchid Pharma, described the journey from idea to market as long and uncertain, then gave it a figure. Eighteen years from the point the molecule was written on a piece of paper in a Chennai laboratory.
Discovery is the short clause in that sentence. Financing, development, regulatory approval and marketing are the rest of it. Discovery takes a village working together, Paul said. Not one person, not one lab.
Volume to value
Vasan Sambandamurthy, senior vice-president at Bugworks Research, put the strategic problem crisply. India built its global position through manufacturing. The next move is from volume to value, and he listed what that requires: patient capital, regulatory processes at global standard, quality as a culture rather than a checklist, and talent with real global exposure.
On capital he was direct. Funds need patient character to support good ideas, because moving a drug from early discovery to translation can take eight to ten years or more, and that sits inside Paul's eighteen rather than alongside it.
This part travels well beyond pharma, to anyone working on India's deep-tech ambitions. The financing instruments that work for software do not transfer. A fund built around a seven-year horizon cannot hold an asset that matures in eighteen.
The gap nobody owns
M.M. Balamurali, professor at VIT Chennai's Centre for Healthcare Advancement, Innovation and Research, named the problem from the academic side. Institutions run good fundamental research and then hit a wall: they lack the manufacturing-level infrastructure to scale promising work. Getting from fundamental research to a market-level product, he said, is very challenging.
That gap sits between two parties who each assume the other owns it. Academia produces the science and cannot industrialise it. Industry can industrialise but wants the risk taken out first. The panel's answer was to bring industry and regulators in from the early stages of research rather than at handover. That is the right answer and also the hardest one to operationalise, because it asks both sides to commit before the outcome is legible.
Why this is a Tamil Nadu story
The state has the pieces. Orchid Pharma's molecule came out of a Chennai lab. VIT Chennai is running a translational research centre. Bugworks is Indian deep-tech competing on discovery rather than volume. The pharmaceutical and manufacturing base is real rather than aspirational.
What the panel described as missing is not talent or capacity. It is the connective tissue between them: capital willing to wait, regulatory predictability, and a working handoff from the bench to the plant. Those are solvable, and none of them get solved by another accelerator programme.
Eighteen years is the honest number. A policy conversation that does not start from it is having a different conversation.