Upgraded Drug Testing Lab At Vadodara In Gujarat To Become Operational From Feb 2019

Mumbai, 10 Jan 2019: In order to strengthen the drug testing infrastructure in Gujarat, the drug testing lab at Vadodara which was being upgraded to international standards with the support of Gujarat Food and Drug Control Administration (FDCA) will soon start its operations from February 2019. 

Upgradation of drug testing lab at Vadodara will boost the capacity by five times from its current drug testing capacity of 13,000 samples per month which involves microbiological, biological and chemical testing. An amount of Rs.4 crore has been successfully utilised by the state government and efforts are on to recruit manpower to do testing modalities.

Gujarat has also been leading in the country in terms of collection and analysis of drug samples through its post-marketing surveillance programme as part of its ongoing crackdown on spurious drugs.

Further, Gujarat FDCA through its ongoing random sampling surveys at retail and wholesale stores, hospitals and manufacturing sites registered a collection of 13,540 drug samples in 2017 which is the highest in the country.

This was followed by states like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh.

Vadodara-based drug testing lab had tested the maximum number of 6,025 drug samples as part of a pan India spurious drugs survey which concluded last year to assess for the first time complete testing of not-of-standard quality (NSQ) drugs as per Indian pharmacopoeia and other pharmacopoeias.

This was followed by Central Drug Testing Lab (CDTL) Hyderabad which tested 5,461samples, CDTL Mumbai which tested 5,418 samples, CDTL Chennai which tested 5,257samples, CDTL Bengaluru which tested 2,033 samples and Maharashtra which tested 186 samples. 

Done at an estimated cost of Rs.8.5 crore, the Union health ministry had entrusted the job of National Drugs Survey in July 28, 2014 to Noida based National Institute of Biologicals (NIB) which came out with a survey based on the pan-India sampled field data to the tune of 48,000 samples. Pharmabiz