Jakarta Globe, Adam Plowright, March 31, 2013
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| An employee checks on packaged drugs stored in the Stability Chambers of Himalaya Drug Company in Bangalore on February 14, 2013. (AFP Photo/ Manjunath Kiran) |
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Bangalore,
India. Its raw materials are plants and it bases its products on texts dating
back millennia, but don’t dare call India’s biggest herbal healthcare group a
maker of “alternative medicine.”
“It’s high
time people took us very seriously and did not view us as an alternative form
of medicine,” says Philipe Haydon, the India chief executive of the Himalaya
group from his office in tech and healthcare hub Bangalore.
“This is
not a feel-good product. This will save a man’s life,” he says, taking a box
from a stack next to his desk.
It is
marked Liv 52, a blend of six herbs used to treat liver disorders, and is one
of the firms best-selling products.
In two
recent clinical tests, results published in the World Journal of
Gastroenterology in 2007 and in the Antiviral Research journal in 2009 showed
significant results.
“It so
happens that the input material is a herb but the rest of it is very very
modern,” said the 50-year-old, who joined Himalaya in 1979.
The group
is an Indian healthcare success story, combining ancient traditional medicine
known as Ayurveda with cutting-edge technology.
Its
air-tight production facility converts truck-loads of fragrant organic matter
into eight million tablets a day and 10,000 bottles of medicine.
In the
quality control area, men and women in lab coats sit next to conveyor belts as
tablets fly past on their way into plastic pots carrying Himalaya’s green and
orange labels.
In the
research and development wing, 250 scientists are working to find new
combinations of herbs whose active ingredients are extracted and concentrated
to form products that are then tested by humans.
Sales have
quadrupled in the last five years to reach 12 billion rupees ($220 million) in
2012. Its target is a billion dollars in annual revenue in the next four years
as it spreads into foreign markets.
Spreading
Ayurveda
Ayurvedic
medicine — which means the “science of life” in Sanskrit — treats the physical
and mental sources of illness through, for example, prescribing herbs in
conjunction with yoga or massage.
Much of the
knowledge, passed on by word of mouth, predates written records, but two
volumes of remedies and prescriptions have survived called the Caraka Samhita
and the Sushruta Samhita.
“This is
where it all begins, these herbal texts that were handed down 3,000 years ago,”
said Haydon.
“We look at
the kind of combinations [of herbs] that are suggested and from that point
onwards we have a group of scientists who bring contemporary medicine and
science to those texts.”
The group
now has 75 remedies, including treatments for hypertension, kidney stones and
cholesterol.
An
estimated 80 percent of India’s 1.2-billion population uses Ayurvedic medicine,
partly for cost reasons, with a pack of 100 Liv 52 tablets selling for just 65
rupees ($1.20).
To raise
its profile and revenues, Himalaya branched out in 1996 into consumer products
such as shampoos and sun cream.
Like the
pharmaceuticals, these use herbs such as neem, a tree known as a “village
pharmacy” in rural India due to the range of its medicinal properties.
Dotted
around India but centered in the temperate foothills of the Himalayas, 4,000
producers of leaves, roots and plants are busy farming for the group on
long-term contracts.
Competition
The
rejection of the “alternative” tag is partly borne of bitter experience in the
West, where regulations on pharmaceuticals mean Himalaya’s products are classed
as food supplements and thus stocked alongside other treatments that Haydon
dismisses as “feel-good products”.
If Himalaya
must be considered “alternative”, he says it should be seen only as an
alternative to multi-national pharmaceutical firms.
“We are
competing with GlaxoSmithKline, Beechams and AstraZeneca. They have products
for diabetes, so do we. They have products for hepatitis, so do we,” he says.
Overall,
the resources are tiny compared with a giant like GlaxoSmithKline which
recorded a $7.0-billion profit last year.
And
Himalaya holds a mere eight patents having “got out of the patent race” because
they offered little protection from competitors who could simply copy a
combination, add a new herb and then claim it as a different product.
Jon
Tilburt, an expert on modern Western and traditional medicine at the Mayo
Clinic healthcare group in the United States, says he understands why Himalaya
rejects the “alternative” label.
“There are
plenty of herbal companies and all of them in some ways would like to have the
esteem of a pharmaceutical company but then none of them wants the regulatory
burden,” he told AFP.
“They
really want their own category of a sort of executive club for herbal players.”
Generally
the scientific evidence on alternative medicine is mixed, he said, echoing the
World Health Organization which has called for more funding to test traditional
treatments from India, Africa or China.
And there
are potential dangers that give the herbal industry a bad name.
A study
published this month by Graham Lord, a professor of medicine at King’s College
London, warned about remedies once sold but now banned in the West that contain
aristolochic acids linked to kidney failure.
“Herbal
remedies around the world are not legislated as medicines,” he told AFP.
“Because it’s herbal, it’s not necessarily safe.”
But for
Himalaya, the future appears bright — not least because the domestic drugs market
is growing at an annual rate of 15 percent, according to the Confederation of
Indian Industries.
Agence France-Presse
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