Ranbaxy Laboratories' gleaming, plant in the Himalayan foothills -- where it is ready to supply 20 million generic anti-anthrax antibiotics a month for the US market -- offers no atypically grim Indian industrial scenes.
The air is crystal clean. Lush, green fields stretch as far as the eye can see with not even an oxen or downtrodden villager in sight. The sprawling plant that lies a five-hour drive along a twisting road from the congested, polluted capital of New Delhi is a pristine facility.
The 160 technicians put in eight-hour shifts and the employees -- from the plant director down -- eat hearty, nourishing meals from the same, heavily subsidized menu.
Ranbaxy sprang into the headlines after it offered to supply 20 million generic tablets of Cipro -- the preferred anthrax drug treatment -- to the US as panic mounted about the possibility of a broad bioterrorist attack on the country.
If it gets the green light, the plant near the Sikh shrine of Paonta Sahib on the banks of the Yamuna River, would be at the center of the firm's US-bound production, plant director Ramesh Parekh said.
Right now, the lone company allowed to sell Cipro in the US is German drug company Bayer AG, whose patent on the medication expires in Dec. 2003.
The anthrax scare has opened up a potential revenue stream for Indian generic drug companies, which this year emerged as a provider of inexpensive AIDS drugs for Africa.
Indian law allows patents only on processes by which drugs are made rather than the drug itself. As a result, Indian companies can produce drugs which are under patent in the West as long as they make them differently from the original.
Ranbaxy made the proposal to supply generic Cipro after it got a call from New York Senator Charles Schumer asking whether it could provide the drug quickly.
However, Ranbaxy is well positioned to sell to the US ciprofloxacin as generic Cipro is known. Its twice-a-day pill already has US Food and Drug Administration approval for sale once Bayer's patent expires.
"To produce 20 million ciprofloxacin pills would be around a 20-day job for a machine working about eight hours a day," said Parekh, a 26-year Ranbaxy veteran. He said the company at the moment makes about 8 million ciprofloxacin pills a month.
Just one of the plant's three shiny, tablet-compression machines can spit out around a million pills in an eight-hour shift.
Bayer, seeking to deflect calls for the sale of knockoffs of its drug, has promised to more than triple production to meet the dosage requirements of 1.7 million people. US officials, though, want to set aside enough medicine to treat 12 million.
Ranbaxy has not said at what price it would sell the tablets in the US but promised it would be "attractive."
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