‘Coronavirus hits supply of pharma ingredients to India’: Prof Anil D Sahasrabudhe

‘Coronavirus hits supply of pharma ingredients to India’: Prof Anil D Sahasrabudhe

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, Feb 25, 2020 DHNS: Innovations and research in the future will be from multidisciplinary areas and most of the research, innovations and products that are going to come out of engineering are going to be bio-inspired,” remarked Prof Anil D Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), New Delhi.

He was speaking at the three-day international conference on ‘Advances in Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences (ICAPHS-2020)’ organised by NGSM Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, a constituent college of Nitte(Deemed to be University).

He said with new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning coming to the fore, it has become mandatory to embed technology into pharmacy, medical, and health sciences education as much as the need to embed biology and biological science in technology education.

There is a need to build an ecosystem of innovation and every institution must have an innovation cell, he urged.

Delivering the keynote address, Dr B Suresh, president, Pharmacy Council of India, said the advances in the pharmaceutical sciences is so rapid and dynamic that the students must improve their knowledge, expertise, and skill sets to take up the challenges and be able to find solutions to
problems.

He said that the pharmaceutical industry will undergo major changes in the near future. The shift from ‘Pills to Cells’ is the new era theme and stem cell therapy, wearable devices, 3-D printed organs are the medical solutions of the future.

Due to the outbreak of coronavirus in China, which is the major supplier of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients to India, the pharmaceutical production in India has been adversely affected and the prices of drugs are likely to be increased by 40%.

“India has the ability to deal with the situation since it was an Indian company that offered the solution to the dreaded Ebola and Zika virus, which wreaked havoc in the African continent,” he added.

Echoing the recommendations of the Kasturirangan Committee on the New Education Policy, N Vinaya Hegde, Chancellor, Nitte (Deemed to be University) said that there was an urgent need for the education policymakers to have a relook into the education delivery system.

He said that integrating pragmatic and hands-on education system and providing holistic and multi-disciplinary exposure to students is the best way to prepare them to use their full human potential to address current and future issues.Vice Chancellor Dr Satheesh Kumarr Bhandary and others were present.