Unhealthy lifestyles to drive surge in Indian demand for costly medicine

Diseases related to unhealthy lifestyles are expected to drive a huge rise in demand for more costly medicine in India, presenting drug firms with a rich opportunity.

The growing popularity of fast food India is one of the reasons for the proliferation of lifestyle diseases in India. Manan Vatsyayana / AFP
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Diseases related to unhealthy lifestyles are expected to drive a huge rise in demand for more costly medicine in India, presenting drug firms with a rich opportunity.

“The lifestyle drugs – treatment for diabetes, cancer, heart attacks – will boom,” said Sonam Udasi, IDBI Capital’s senior vice president and head of research.

“The multinational drug companies are looking at this part of the market over the next 10 years.

Increasingly people are able to pay for cancer treatments and things like that. These are very margin-centric businesses for pharmaceutical firms.”

These lifestyle-related conditions would only continue to proliferate with the growing popularity of fast food in India, Mr Udasi said.

Acute therapies, which are treatments for short-term conditions, are much more affordable to the masses and they have dominated the domestic market.

The Indian credit ratings agency ICRA said chronic-disease segments such as cardiovascular, anti-diabetic, neurology, psychiatry had been growing at a faster pace because of the changing demographics and lifestyle patterns.

It said chronic therapies would be likely to comprise more than 50 per cent of India’s healthcare market by 2020, driven by cardiovascular and anti-diabetic treatments.

Acute therapy medicines currently account for 73 per cent of India’s healthcare market, according to ICRA.

A recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Confederation of Indian Industry said chronic therapies had been “outperforming the market for the past four years” and had grown at a rate of 14 per cent, faster than the 9.6 per cent pace of acute therapies.

“The contribution of chronic therapies to the Indian pharmaceutical market has gone up from 27 per cent in 2010 to 30 per cent in 2013,” it said.