Subsidiary Of The Conglomerate Boenjamin Setiawan: The Health Industry Needs Collaboration To Be Independent

JAKARTA - The domestic health industry is considered to require collaboration between stakeholders in order to be able to independently meet the needs of the Indonesian health sector.

"Cooperation or collaboration can be carried out in the fields of innovation and research in producing health industry products such as medicines," said President Director of PT Kalbe Farma Tbk Vidjongtius, at the Investor Daily Summit which was monitored online in Jakarta, quoted from Antara, Friday 16 July.

This subordinate of the conglomerate Boenjamim Setiawan added that research in the health sector in the discovery of drug therapy takes a long time so it requires collaboration for acceleration.

"First, it is research innovation to find new molecules and new technologies. If we can't do it ourselves, we can also build collaborations between academia, business, government and the community," said Vidjongtius.

According to him, independence in the domestic health industry requires substantial investment from upstream to downstream. He gave an example of the collaboration carried out by Kalbe Farma in clinical trials of immunomodulators for COVID-19 patients.

The clinical trial process can be carried out faster through collaboration than doing research alone. Another collaboration carried out by Kalbe Farma is in the implementation of clinical trials of the COVID-19 GX-19N vaccine.

Secretary General of the Ministry of Health Oscar Primadi emphasized the need for the domestic health industry such as pharmaceuticals and medical devices to be developed independently.

This is intended so that Indonesia does not experience dependence on medicinal raw materials that must be imported or medical devices from abroad during a health crisis like today. Oscar emphasized that the government had made various efforts to reduce dependence on imports of medicinal raw materials.

"The COVID-19 crisis situation has become a very valuable lesson that Indonesia can do more than usual. The ability of the pharmaceutical health service industry, domestic medical devices, pharmaceutical products is one of the essential needs and can guarantee national security," said Oscar.

According to Oscar, the pharmaceutical and medical device industry in Indonesia has the capacity to drive production to meet the needs of the health sector in Indonesia.

Of the total 19 types of medical devices that are included in the top 10 transactions based on the value and number of products, almost 90 percent of them can be produced domestically.