Rishi

The USA-India Chamber of Commerce, a bilateral Chamber of Commerce held its annual U.S.-India BioPharma and Healthcare Summit on May 11 at the Hyatt Cambridge.

The summit focused on overcoming the barriers to building collaborative partnerships between the Indian and global companies. The agenda for 2012 summit was a result of a post summit strategy session held in Delhi in November 2011. The brainstorming session was attended by over 40 prominent CEOs, as well as government officials.

Panel discussions and keynotes at the event cover topics such as drug discovery and development, emerging markets, licensing, academic partnerships, clinical research, funding innovation and cross border mergers and acquisitions trends. There was also a panel discussion on oncology deliberating on the science, research trends and investor perspective.

There was an exclusive "by invitation-only" strategy sessions focused on industry-academic partnerships co-chaired by Noble Laureate Philip Sharp of MIT and Sridaran Natesan of Sanofi. An external R&D strategies session was co-chaired by Rick Connell of Pfizer, Sandeep Gupta of Endo Pharma and Sri Mosur of Jubilant Life Sciences.

"Our annual summit is a purpose driven initiative to foster innovation and collaborative research between the global BioPharma industry and India," said Karun Rishi, president of the USA-India Chamber of Commerce. "I encourage the active participation of all stakeholders who share our purpose of working together for an innovation driven healthier world."
 
"India offers vast opportunities for drug discovery and development for global pharma companies. USA-India Chamber of Commerce has been playing a vital role to facilitate collaborative research partnerships by bringing key stakeholders together to foster innovation in drug discovery and development," said Srikant Kumar Jena, Indian minister of state for chemicals and fertilizers. "The summit gains more prominence in view of developing global partnerships to deliver affordable innovations to the masses through strategic thinking and ground breaking solutions."

"With each year, the USA-India Chamber of Commerce has been growing in strength and enabling fruitful partnerships between global and Indian companies. The oncology theme for this year's U.S.-India BioPharma Summit is an endeavor to give a new dimension of disease focus to this platform," said K.V. Subramaniam, CEO of Reliance Life Sciences.

"Innovation, patient safety and global access are more intertwined — and more critical to improving lives around the world — than ever before. We must reinvent health-care innovation, creating new models that invite broad cross-sector collaboration, so that we innovate not only in the laboratory, but also create new kinds of partnerships based on the realization that medical advances mean nothing unless they reach the patients who need them most. The summit brings us closer to this goal by enabling exchange of essential ideas and opinions," said Michael Rosenblatt, executive vice president and CMO at Merck & Co.