India set to lead genomics revolution amid global patents expiry wave: Report

NEW DELHI: India is uniquely positioned to capitalise on a global genomics revolution and a looming $300 billion patent expiry wave that is driving an aggressive wave of biopharma acquisitions, a report said on Wednesday.

India hosts more WHO-certified pharmaceutical manufacturing plants than any other country on earth and for three decades, the model has been consistent science invented in the West, scaled and delivered by India, the report from Vallum Capital said.

The huge patent expiry wave will present Indian manufacturers with their largest growth windows and the medicines that are going to expire are not small molecules, but biologics, gene therapies and precision oncology drugs.

India is building capabilities in these fields through initiatives such as the Biopharma Shakti scheme and the Genome India Project mapping 10,000 genomes across 99 ethnic groups, the report said.

The firm noted India’s domestic genomics market is growing at over 16 per cent annually and is actively building toward this moment.

Globally, artificial intelligence is compressing drug discovery timelines from a decade to under 18 months and clinical genomic data and machine learning are producing commercial revenue that validates faster development.

Across the genomics sector, companies are now using clinical genomic data to accelerate target identification at a scale no conventional research organisation could match.

Some platforms are running over a million biological experiments weekly using machine learning.

Biopharma M&A reached $106 billion across 201 deals in just the first half of 2026, on pace for the strongest full year since pre-pandemic.

In the first half of 2026, biotech IPOs raised more capital than the entire sector managed across all of 2025 a year when only 11 companies went public globally. Venture capital deployed into biotech hit $38 billion in 2025, up 28 per cent year-on-year.