Local drug company offers branded yet affordable meds

CEBU, Philippines - A locally-based drug manufacturing company is giving the Filipinos, especially those wary of the effectiveness of generic medicines, the option to buy quality yet affordable branded medicines.

“We say affordable, not cheap. By affordable we mean prices that are 50-percent to 60-percent lower than the originator (the drug company owning the patent of a particular drug,)” said Dante Agagan, new product manager of Interphil Laboratories.

He said in an interview yesterday on the sidelines of the launching in Cebu of its new product, Actidin Quik, at the Royal Concourse Restaurant that Interphil does not compare its products with generic medicines, which are mostly imported from India, saying Interphil-manufactured medicines “are not at par, in terms of quality, with generic ones.”

“They (generic and Interphil-made medicines could not be compared because they) are in different fields. We can assure the Filipinos that the medicines we manufacture are of the same quality with those (said to be manufactured and distributed) by multi-national companies because we manufacture some of these,” Agagan said.

He revealed that Interphil, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Filipino drug distribution company, Zuellig Pharma Philippines, has been manufacturing the medicines distributed in the country of multinational pharmaceutical companies Wyeth, Pfizer, Abbot, Boehringer, Johnson and Johnson and Sanofi-aventis, among others, since 1975.

Interphil manufactures 40-percent of the pharmaceutical products distributed in the country. These include Robitussin, Dimetapp, Incremin and Lactacyd. The company has also been exporting these products to Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan and Korea since 1999.

The company decided to launch its own products in 2009 after the contract it signed with the Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC), which was then under the administration of former Bulacan Governor Robert Pagdanganan, failed.

As part of Pagdanganan’s program to provide affordable medicines to the Filipinos, PITC signed a contract in 2007 with Interphil for the latter to develop 27 pharmaceutical products that will be sold at affordable prices. This however was not consummated.

 “But our company has already invested for the research and development of the products. That is why we have decided to market the product, in coordination with the Botica ng Bayan (not the same with the government’s Botica ng Bayad) Multi-purpose Cooperative in a program called Sagot na Gamot. This is also in line with Interphil’s social corporate responsibility program,” Agagan said.

He admitted that Interphil’s move of launching its own products is a risk, as this may offend their international clients and may result in loss of business. However, the company’s desire to serve the Filipinos made it decide to “take the risk.”

To protect their clients and to avoid head-on competition, Interphil is focusing its distribution to the independent and small drugstores, especially those in the provinces.