India's Health Ministry seeks to ease drug imports, reduce waste
India's Health Ministry is looking to update how drugs are imported, with a focus on making things simpler for research and cutting down on wasted medicines.
The main idea: tweak shelf-life rules and ease the process for bringing in small batches of drugs for testing.
Shelf-life could fall to 12 months
The shelf-life requirement for imported drugs could drop from 60% to just 12 months left at the time of import, except for stricter cases like biologics and radiopharmaceuticals.
For research, startups and labs may soon skip some red tape when importing tiny amounts of drugs (unless they are sex hormones, cytotoxic drugs, beta lactam drugs, biologics containing live microorganisms, or narcotic and psychotropic substances).
The Ministry says quality and safety standards won't change, just less hassle for researchers and less medicine going to waste.