India is a primary market to penetrate and enable access to TB test cartridges: Dr Laurent Bellon

Bengaluru, March 15, 2023 :

India is absolutely a primary market to penetrate and enable access to tuberculosis (TB) test cartridges, said Dr Laurent R Bellon, senior vice president, operations, Cepheid, USA.

We are on an aggressive mode working to support the government of India for the elimination of TB in a different form. This is through the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme. To this end, we have now commissioned our advanced facility to manufacture tuberculosis testing cartridges Xpert from Bengaluru, he added.

It was in 2018 that we undertook a mission to take this Make in India forward. We are also doing a few things to fundamentally get close to our customers by looking to make low cost supply on our testing cartridges for India and other countries based on nuclei acid testing. This is with the objective of driving a self-reliant India to perform the TB testing within the country, Dr Bellon told Pharmabiz on the sidelines of the Cepheid manufacturing facility inauguration housed within the Karnataka government’s Defence and Aerospace Park at the Industrial Area, Mahadeva Kodigehalli, Bengaluru.
 
Our commitment to India is feeding into the long standing history of Cepheid in penetrating and enabling the global access. We identified Bengaluru early as the right city for us to establish shop here when we looked at the entire market condition of labour employment which is a key capability to sourcing the talent base, that we were in need of. Today at this site, we have 160 associates and 400 across India across all functions. We have a strong gender diversity of 48 per cent. At this particular site, we will be continuing to expand over the years to accelerate our full support to the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme by 2025, he said.

India is key for us and this particular production site is our crowning jewel. With a new manufacturing architecture, specifically designed for the Indian market, its special production lines are engineered with the right element of automation and human interface. Such technology integration helps to propel our ‘Made in India’ push where our strong supply chain is radically integrated to facilitate high product transformation from raw material to assembly to finish goods, said Dr Bellon.

Although the main objective is to serve the Indian market first, Cepheid will look to leverage its capabilities to serve the other 30 high burden countries as defined by the WHO that have a high TB pressure which are in Africa and South East Asia. We are in active discussion and planning to provide the ‘Made in India’ molecular testing in these regions which will be exported from India. Obviously, we are in lockstep with the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme, he said.

Currently, around 10 to 15 million annual testing is performed in India as per reports. According to Dr Bellon, this could be easily done using the Cepheid’s GeneXpert system and Xpert test cartridges by the WHO in 2010 following the endorsement of our nuclei acid testing technology. We are continuing to expand this particular programme in conjunction with global vendors and WHO. But it is also essential to have public partnerships in India and progress towards the End of TB initiative. Pharmabiz