-The Telegraph New Delhi: The World Health Organisation has announced a plan to approve generic versions of two expensive bio-therapeutic anti-cancer molecules in an effort to make them available to low and middle-income countries. It said it would invite manufacturers to submit applications for pre-qualification of biologically similar versions of rituximab, used to treat chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and trastuzumab, used to treat breast cancer. The pre-qualification process is a mechanism...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Doctors and public health groups have come together to suggest that the government should phase out branded drugs in a calibrated manner and ban differential pricing under different brands to promote generic drug prescriptions. This comes in the wake of PM Narendra Modi's announcement that the government was working on a legal framework to ensure that doctors mandatorily prescribed low cost Generic Medicines. Following the PM's...

-The Hindu We need a legal mechanism to ensure that all generics are of the same standard as the innovator product The Prime Minister’s recent announcement on making it mandatory for doctors to prescribe only the generic name, and not brand name of a drug, has led to a flutter. If enacted, the move will make it illegal for Indian doctors to write out a prescription for the trademark of the drug,...

-Business Standard To make medicines cheaper, in another measure, govt added 200 drug formulations to NLEM list New Delhi/ Mumbai: Pharma companies may soon start wooing chemists as the Narendra Modi government plans to make it mandatory for doctors to prescribe pure-generic drugs, instead of branded generics as they do now. Though the plan was first announced in this year’s Budget, the prime minister spoke about it for the first time at a...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Regulatory efforts to get doctors in India to prescribe medicines only through their generic names, initiated about 15 years ago, will need to overcome legal challenges and resistance from sections of doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, experts said. Senior pharmacologists and industry analysts have also said it will be misleading to presume that prescriptions with generic names will automatically translate into lower medicine bills for patients as studies...