Meet on inculcating IT in pharmaceutical sector

Mumbai, Aug 10: At a time when information technology (IT) has become a buzzword in the industrial scenario of the country, the pharmaceutical sector was yet to reap its benefits, participants felt at a day-long seminar jointly held by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Zensar Technologies here today.

The topic of the seminar was 'Innovative technologies for business excellence in the pharmaceutical industry'.

Inaugurating the seminar, Chairperson of the Maharashtra State Council and director of strategic alliance&communications, Nicholas Piramal India, Dr Swati Piramal, said ''Adding IT and Indian pharma you can beat the world in many, many benchmarks''.

The future will see a two-way partnership between the west and the east and vice versa, she added.

Dr Piramal's views were shared by the convenor of IT&ITES panel, CII Maharashtra and founder CEO of Kalzoom Technologies, Dr Uma Ganesh. She said ''The role of IT and pharma should be looked at in three dimensions which include speed, quality and innovation''.

The days are gone when Indian pharma companies used IT as a secondary tool for manufacturing the drugs. Particularly, when global pharma giants are spreading their wings in India and their Indian counterparts are going global, she reasoned.

Adding a cautionery note to the topic, the chairman of outsourcing sub-committee (WR), CII and deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies, Dr Ganesh Natarajan, said that ''The challenge was to keep innovating at competitive prices in a shorter span of time, to market by sharing information and managing merged information''.

A beautiful presentation was made by the vice president, submission and validation practice, Impact Systems Inc, Laura J.

Sherman on 'Regulatory compliance, ECDT (electronic clinical data transmission) requirements&general considerations'. Another presentation was made by her on 'Validation software for pharmaceutical application' on the occasion.

In his presentation on 'Business intelligence solutions for enabling drug research' the chief technology officer of Zensar Technologies, Sanjay Hora, explained how technology can facilitate demands of data compilation, storage, processing, analysis and presentation.

UNI