With global pharma companies leveraging IT to cut costs, Indian technology firms such as TCS, Satyam, Patni and Cognizant are now stepping up presence in life science space.
"Increasing costs of R&D, coupled with low productivity and poor bottom lines, have forced major pharma companies worldwide to outsource part of their data management activities to low-cost countries, thereby saving costs and time in the process," TCS Vice President and Global Head - Life Sciences and Healthcare ISU - Debashis Ghosh said.
Indian IT companies have been helping life sciences organisations with services ranging from application development, maintenance, testing and upgrade to global roll out and implementation, he added.
The country's largest software exporter TCS earns about 5.3 per cent of its revenue from the life science processes.
According to a research firm Life Science Insights (LSI), worldwide IT spending for the life science sector would reach 38.9 billion dollar by the end of 2008, driven by the need to tackle regulatory burdens and costly clinical trials, and by life sciences companies leveraging IT to enable personalized medicine.
"With data growth fast outpacing the growth in the infrastructure capabilities of life science companies, it has become a necessity to outsource key activities related to storing, accessing, securing, and managing of data.
"This, coupled with the regulatory compliance, is driving the IT intervention amongst the life science companies," Cognizant Life Sciences Practice Leader J Sairamkumar said.
Pharmaceutical companies are expanding Post-Market Drug Safety Initiatives to prevent adverse reactions. This is because of heightened public awareness of drug safety, greater regulatory scrutiny, a number of recent drug withdrawals and black box warnings, industry experts said.
Out of the several processes, the adverse event case processing is becoming a fast growing service stream.
Adverse event reporting relates to tracking changes in health or side effects that occurs in a person who participates in a clinical trial while he is receiving treatment or within specified period.
It is a computerised information database designed to support the FDA's post-marketing safety surveillance program for all approved drug and therapeutic biologic products.
Patni which is a major player in the life science process outsourcing space said adverse event case processing is a growing service stream.
"This is a fairly young but rapidly growing segment of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) where apart from technologists, we are inducting doctors, pharmacists and even nurses who bring understanding of medicare processes and help in extending services," Patni Senior Vice-President and Head Sanjiv Kapur said.
Adverse Event case processing outsourcing is complex and is part of KPO. As per various market estimates, KPO is expected to grow to 17 billion dollar by end of 2010 and will employ about 2,50,000 professionals, he added.
Another IT major Satyam Computer Services had recently formed an alliance with a Westborough-based life science KPO company Sciformix Corporation to deliver data management services in Pharmacovigilance.
Both the companies would collaborate to enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to better monitor the safety of the products they market by offering services across the safety management spectrum, ranging from case intake to international regulatory reporting.
With drug safety being listed as a front and center concern for 2008 for life sciences organisations by Health Industry Insights (January 2008), many more outsourcing deals are likely to come to the Indian IT firms.