Many large pharmaceutical companies are focusing on lucrative emerging markets like India, China and Brazil, to name a few. Emerging markets are slowly and steadily gaining more importance and several companies are now shifting their focus to these areas.
Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) is no exception to the above mentioned trend. In a bid to expand its footprint in India, the biopharmaceutical major extended its tie-up with Syngene International by five years. Financial details of the extended pact were not revealed. Syngene, a unit of Biocon, is India's largest contract research organization.
The research collaboration between the companies has been in existence since 2007. The companies have been focusing on developing integrated capabilities in fields like medicinal and process chemistry, biology and biotechnology. The companies worked in Bangalore at the Biocon Bristol-Myers Squibb Research Center (BBRC).
This drug discovery partnership has so far yielded six candidates for further study. The Indian collaboration has helped Bristol-Myers to reduce the time and costs pertaining to the advancement of candidates to first-in-human studies from the preclinical phase.
Bristol-Myers stated in its press release that following the pre clinical work done at BBRC, Bristol-Myers was able to advance the development of most of its small molecule candidates further. With the initial phase of the partnership yielding such promising results, we believe that the extension of the pact is a logical step.
Apart from Bristol-Myers, companies like Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) and Mylan (NASDAQ: MYL) are also focusing on the Indian market which offers great potential.
Bristol-Myers currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A better-ranked biopharma stock is Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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