Shares of Pfizer Ltd, the Indian arm of United States pharmaceutical major Pfizer Inc, crashed 7.02% to Rs. 1,792.45 on BSE after the company today announced that it has discontinued the manufacture and sales of its codeine-based cough syrup Corex, which is one of largest selling drugs in India.
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According to the government panel, the fixed dose combination of “chlopheniramine maleate and codeine syrup is likely to involve risk to human beings” and hence the “drug is found to have no therapeutic justification”.
Abbott’s Phensedyl accounts for about a third of the Indian cough syrup market, and its sales are estimated to make up more than 3 per cent of the company’s $1 billion India revenue. While Pfizer’s India unit sells the product by the name Corex, Abbott does so by the brand name Phensedyl.
While it has banned 344, the review process is ongoing, the health ministry’s Sharma said.
Reuters reported last October that Indian regulators were privately pressuring drug firms to better police the selling of popular codeine-based cough syrups to tackle smuggling and addiction. “It was done after much examination”, the official said.
“We are happy that this will end the misuse of the medicine”, said Akun Sabharwal, drugs controller for the southern state of Telangana, that previous year detected an “illegal diversion” of Phensedyl worth about $8.5 million. It added that it was “exploring all possible options at its disposal”.
The company termed the Health Ministry’s decision to ban “certain fixed dose combinations drugs that have been already approved” as a “unilateral approach”.
In a report published by the Business-Standard, “US pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories’ India unit will comply with all legal requirements of a government order that bans more than 300 combination drugs in the country, a company spokesman said on Monday”. But several drug combinations have entered the market over the years based on approval exclusively from states.
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In its investigation, Reuters interviewed former and current medical representatives for Abbott who said Zimnic AZ had been promoted and administered as a treatment for a broad array of illnesses, including colds, fevers, urinary tract infections, drug-resistant typhoid and sexually transmitted diseases.
