State support measures for pharmaceutical industry, prospects for the system development and a dialogue of regulators, business, and public: the 30th Edition of the Semashko Forum
This year, the 30th anniversary edition of Russian Pharmaceutical Forum named after Academician Nikolai Semashko was traditionally held in St. Petersburg on May 16th and 17th with the support of the FSI “State Institute of Drugs and Good Practices” under the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia.
The first day of the forum saw a large plenary session held as part of the business agenda – an open discussion between representatives of regulatory authorities, professional associations, scientific organizations, patient communities, and industry experts.
At the beginning of the session, heads of large pharmaceutical companies exchanged their views on the priorities of the industry’s development in today’s reality, spoke about their best practices, discussed issues of ensuring the sustainability of the pharmaceutical market and maintaining drug availability on the part of business, as well as promotion channels in the existing situation when some foreign companies exited the market.
The facilitator of the second part of the plenary session – the dialogue between regulators and the industry – was Vladislav Shestakov, Director of the State Institute of Drugs and Good Practices of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia. “Over the last few years, the conditions created by the relevant agencies have played a special role in the active development of the domestic pharmaceutical industry,” he noted in his opening remarks.
Lilia Titova, Executive Director of the Union of Professional Pharmaceutical Organizations, became the co-facilitator. She asked the representatives of regulatory authorities the questions that primarily concerned the industry.
Dmitry Galkin, Director of the Department for Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry Development, Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, spoke about the existing and potential opportunities of the domestic pharmaceutical industry, the pace of increasing production volumes, goals for mitigating the potential shortage risks, and state support measures,
“The changes that we observe in the pharma regulation over the past 5 years are the result of joint work of all federal agencies. If we talk about our financial support mechanisms, then, of course, this is the Industrial Development Fund with its large palette of programmes for amounts from 50 million to 2 billion rubles, which can be flexibly adjusted to the objectives of pharmaceutical enterprises. A large number of supported pharma projects prove the effectiveness and importance of this mechanism for the industry.”
In the second part of the plenary session, representatives of the Ministry of Health of Russia, the Federal Antimonopoly Service, and the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation joined the open dialogue and spoke about the measures they were taking to support the pharmaceutical industry.
The modified format of the Semashko Forum, this year, gave the speakers an opportunity to cover the selected topic of their presentation in a more profound manner, while the industry got a chance to ask regulatory authorities questions and immediately get answers at first hand.
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