Working together to fight a pandemic

If there was ever a time when our motto Good Health Can’t Wait needed to be met every moment of every day, it is in this era when the coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives forever.  

As a company that values life and works to give everybody the opportunity to live healthily and happily, the pandemic’s rising toll has been difficult. Yet, it is this collective grief that has truly fuelled our fire to help those in need.

As soon as the efficacy of Favipiravir was proven, we signed a licensing agreement with Fujifilm Toyama to distribute this important drug in more than 100 countries worldwide. Indonesia is one of them. And our team worked day and night to file and gain product approval on an emergency basis in the country in just 20 days.  

“Generally, teamwork is distributed marketwise, but with the current circumstances of Covid-19, responsibilities have been revised and all energies brought together in one common effort stream,” says Dr Kalyan Chakravarthy, Regulatory and Launch Management Head.  

The Indonesia dossier was divided into several modules, which were all filed, reviewed and documented within 24 hours. The aim was to make a good-quality product available to everyone in Indonesia in the quickest time.  

A detail-oriented approach was the prerequisite for success. “We needed to know everything in detail, including deficiencies and gaps,” says Dr Chakravarthy. “We had to prepare proactively and in advance for any query our partner in Indonesia or the regulatory agency might raise.”  

Time was a challenge, of course, but so was lockdown and the inability of teams from India to travel to Indonesia to smoothen the process. Everything was done virtually, marking a huge shift in the ways we work as well as how we understand the world. “We were prepared to take a risk, and worked diligently to ensure things don’t fall apart,” Dr Chakravarthy says.  

The rewards outweigh the challenges. Because Good Health Can’t Wait.

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