OREANDA-NEWS. October 01, 2010. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Minister discussed the prospects of development and improvements that should be made in the pharmaceutical industry. These, according to Mr Manturov, should include a technological upgrade, the production of essential drugs and the production of innovative domestic pharmaceutical drugs, thus leading to the increase of the export potential.

Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr Manturov, I studied the programme for improving the pharmaceutical industry prepared by your ministry. I would like to sum up its main parameters and concepts, the essence of what actually should be done to implement this programme.

Denis Manturov: Mr Putin, we analysed the current state of the Russian pharmaceutical and medical industry and came to the conclusion that it lags behind its international competitors. So the import of drugs and medical equipment continues to increase.

Last year we approved the Strategy of Improving the Pharmaceutical Industry, as agreed with the government. This year we must coordinate the Strategy of Improving Medical Equipment. To narrow this gap, this concept and the federal targeted programme itself will start the innovation improvement of our pharmaceutical and medical industry.

If you watch closely the first frame, you can see that the pharmaceutical market continues to grow at about 20% each year. Thus, not only Russian, but also international companies will be able to take part in the production of new drugs together with our drug producers.

We set a number of tasks to reach this goal, including the technical re-equipment of the industry, the production of essential drugs, the production of innovative domestic pharmaceutical drugs, and, thus, the increase of the export potential. Unfortunately, a very small portion of our medical products goes to other countries. We cannot resolve these tasks, of course, without qualified personnel. And this is one of our priorities.

By implementing this programme we plan to reach the main target performance indicators. First, to get 765 billion roubles by 2020 for marketing and distributing pharmaceuticals, which will be ten times higher that today's indicators. In general, we, of course, concentrate on national security, and the share of domestically produced essential drugs should reach 90% in the end. The cost of domestically produced drugs should reach 50% of the market, and domestically produced medical equipment should reach about 40%.

There are plans to set up about ten science and research centres within this programme to develop new drugs and about seven science and research centres to design medical equipment. We also plan to train and retrain about 5,000 specialists who will work in various sectors of the Russian pharmaceutical industry.

Our main problem is the promotion of products from research to their industrial production; I mean non-clinical and clinical testing of these drugs. This is actually the main task of the programme. We allocate about 62 billion roubles from the budget on these purposes.

We plan to attract our institutions of higher education, science and research institutes and create pharmaceutical production clusters in several Russian regions. These are, first of all, the St. Petersburg, Moscow-Kaluga, Yaroslavl, Ural, Siberian and Volga regions - the ones that have schools, science centres and, thus, the appropriate educational component. The programme is assessed at about 190 billion roubles, of which 124 billion roubles will come from the budget.

Vladimir Putin: Did you coordinate this with the Ministry of Finance?

Denis Manturov: We coordinated everything with the Ministry of Finance and other agencies. We are now finishing our work on the programme itself and will present it for your consideration in a few days.

Vladimir Putin: Good.