Staff Correspondent
A local company, Active Fine Chemicals Enterprise, has started manufacturing raw materials and chemical reagents for the pharmaceutical industry with a view to lessening import dependency and cutting down time and costs, the company officials said.
They said that although the pharmaceutical industry of Bangladesh has advanced much, backward linkage of this industry is not very strong. The industry has succeeded in securing its place in the international market in a very short span of time, but all of its necessary raw-materials need to be imported from aboard.
A few pharmaceutical companies which produce raw materials in the country can produce only 5.0 per cent of the total requirement and most of these products are used by themselves. The rest is imported from aboard.
The company officials said that AFC will supply a major portion of the raw materials in the coming days and save foreign exchange while it will cut the time and cost now being incurred to import those materials.
The company hopes to supply raw materials worth about Tk 200 million to the local market this year which will gradually increase. By 2010 the company will be able to manufacture all the molecules needed for producing life saving drugs.
The officials informed that AFC’s factory has already been set up at Munsiganj at a cost of Tk 500 million.
ABM Jamaluddin, senior vice president of the company, said that they have already started producing a number of raw materials including reagents used in different laboratories. “It will be possible soon to produce the raw materials used in cancer and diabetes preventive medicine,” he claimed.
“Though the country’s pharmaceutical industry has seen much advancement, significant success in such industries could not be made due to lack of technical knowledge. It now has been made possible,” he said.
He said that a team of chemical engineers comprising members from USA and India are now working with the company. To avail the opportunity of TRIPS Agreement of the WTO, the company is planning to patent a number of drugs in the country before 2016, the company officials said.
Courtesy: thebangladeshtoday.com
