It seems everyone is looking for the holy grail of cheap medicines to treat chronic ailments. Hyderabad’s Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories is working on creating cheaper chemical alternatives to expensive biologics for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), which can be debilitating if left untreated.

“Our programme has initially met with solid success,” says Chairman Anji Reddy. His company has come up with one ‘small molecule’, a chemical drug that tends to be far smaller in size than the larger, more complex biologics. Reddy says this compound works as well as Enbrel, a blockbuster biotech drug from Amgen with revenues of about $4 billion (Rs 18,000 crore) in 2006. IMS Health, a UK-based market research firm, says the global RA market — was at $8 billion (Rs 34,400 crore then) in 2005 — has grown by around 30 per cent in the past two years.

Synta Pharmaceuticals of Lexington in Massachusetts has a clutch of small molecules in various phases of testing for RA, and other diseases that are currently treated with biologics. According to Synta’s website, small-molecule drug candidates require lower investment in infrastructure, face fewer manufacturing constraints and have lower ongoing costs than biologics, which are injected. Synthetic alternatives can be tablets or capsules.

It will be a while before Dr. Reddy’s has a product that can compete in this league. It takes 8-12 years to bring a new drug to the market. Reddy’s RA drug compound is a starting point to understand the ‘mechanism of action’ — how it works in the body to produce the desired effect. Those who suffer from chronic rheumatoid arthritis will have to wait a little longer for relatively inexpensive treatments.