There is a need for an immediate convergence between information technology and biotechnology to tap the $2.84 billion Indian pharmaceutical market, pharmaceutical industry experts said.

Speaking at a chief investment officers' roundtable on healthcare held last week by the National Association of Software and Services Companies, industry experts said that the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a paradigm shift, which demanded a change in the business models.

The CIOs noted that the reverse engineering concept could do to the pharmaceutical sector what body shopping did to IT.

The near unanimous verdict on the areas of convergence came up at the conference were reducing the time for clinical trials to increase the return on investment, extensive automation for sales force, mining the vast information repository, sprucing up the research and development work and to ensure compliance with regulatory issues.

Ajit Dangi, director general of the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, felt that today the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a paradigm shift where there is a need to change the business model from changing the base from chemistry to biology.

"As a result, information technology  can be increasingly harnessed in the fields of bio-statistics, bio-informatics, proteomics and genomics," he said.

This can enable Indian companies to tap the $40 billion US R&D market. Consequently, they can increase R&D spending three times in the next 10 years.

One more silver lining for the industry is with 53 of the top 100 drugs coming off patent by 2005, the market is ripe for utilisation by Indian companies.