The Russian pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in achieving national goals and strategic objectives, and today, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, tough economic sanctions from «unfriendly» countries, the complication of logistics routes and the need to revise a number of business processes, it is showing steady growth. Priority areas for the development of domestic pharmaceuticals became the main topic of the round table «Issues of organizing a full cycle of production of medicines in the Russian Federation», which took place today at the site of the Legislative Assembly of the Kaliningrad Region as part of an off-site meeting of the State Duma Health Committee.

Opening the meeting, the head of the committee, Badma Bashankaev, welcomed everyone to Kaliningrad and assured his colleagues that the deputies were ready to provide the necessary support and assistance in solving the problems facing the industry. «Legislators need to be puzzled,» he said, urging them to apply to the State Duma with initiatives and proposals. And the Deputy Prime Minister of the Government of the Kaliningrad Region, Ilya Barinov, immediately turned to him with a request to legally regulate the issue of mobile pharmacies, which are in dire need of residents of remote and hard-to-reach areas.

In turn Elena Maksimkina, director of the Federal Center for Planning the Organization of Medical Supply, called for paying close attention to patent legislation, this would significantly reduce the financial burden on the healthcare budget and allow for long-term planning in the field of centralized procurement. And Yuri Zhulev, speaking on behalf of the patient community, noted the need for a system for forecasting the needs of the healthcare system and the use of a pharmacoeconomic assessment tool, especially when it comes to domestic innovative drugs.

Speaking about the barriers to drug safety, the head of the Association of Russian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, Victor Dmitriev, also listed the technological gap regarding production equipment, spare parts, software, chemical production, and the lack of qualified personnel, and especially noted the lack of a single regulator. He recalled that the industry has been bringing attention to these problems for a long time, but solutions have not yet been found.

Andrey Gorokhov, a member of the Committee on Health Care, emphasized in his speech stimulating the development of pharmaceutical production, wide opportunities and significant prospects in this area. “The path of generics is an insufficient path,” he said, noting that today the pharmaceutical industry is faced with the task of not just import substitution, but import outpacing. There are a number of positive prerequisites for the successful solution of this problem in the Kaliningrad region: the regime of a special economic zone and the regime of a special customs zone are in force, the mechanism of new investment projects is applied, two state investment parks are located — Khrabrovo and Chernyakhovsk. The personnel issue was not ignored either — a new engineering center for pharmaceuticals was opened on the basis of the Baltic Federal University, and a project called the Balance of Labor Resources was launched jointly with the Rosatom company, aimed at training specialists under the order of a specific employer. All this was told by the Minister of Economic Development of the region Veronika Lesikova.

Recall that the Government recently approved the New Development Strategy «Pharma-2030», and it provides for an increase to 67% of the share of drugs produced in Russia, which means that domestic pharmaceutical production will continue to grow and head for innovation, high standards and safety.