Dr. Swati Piramal: India signed the Patent Act in 1995, 400 years after the rest of the world
Dr.Swati Piramal
Today is a very important day for me because my younger brother is presiding over this gathering at this illustrious Club. And I’m happy that my parents are here to see both of us on the same stage. It is a very special moment for me because we were born and brought up in a Rotary spirit. My father was a Rotarian and we have always seen him working very hard.
This was how Dr. Swati Piramal began her presentation on “Innovation” at the last meeting, speaking before an almost full house after an affectionate introduction by PP Dr. Adi Dastur who recalled that she was his student at the G.S. Medical College in the 1970s. He said that she was both intelligent and humble and, then as now, she was a class apart.
Dr. Swati Piramal, the spouse of Mr. Ajay Piramal, an Honorary member of the Club, was also a former member. She was the first woman president of the 90-year-old, male dominated Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and ad received several rare accolades.
The year 2012 had been special for her in many ways, said Dr. Adi. In April she received the Padma Shri from the President of India; in May she was elected to the Harvard Board
of Overseers, which was a great honour; in September she received the Harvard Alumni Merit Award, which was only given to very few Harvard alumni; and in October she received the Lotus award in New York for her leadership and philanthropy.
The idea of patents went back several millennia. In the year 500 BC, in the great city of Siberia n Italy, encouragement was held out for all those who would discover a new refinement in luxury.
In 1624, England came up with a Statute of Monopolies; and during the reign of Queen Anne in 1702, the lawyers of the English Court developed a requirement of a written description of an invention. In the United States, during the colonial period and the Articles of Confederation in 1778, several States wanted patents and inventions to be part of their Constitution.
But India signed the Patent Act only in 1995′ 400 years after the rest of the world; and now the effort was to catch up with the lapse of 400 years in innovation.
Dr. Piramal said a patent was a form of intellectual property. It consisted of certain exclusive rights and was usually granted by a sovereign state for a limited period of time (a minimum of 20 years). But it had to be remembered that a patent was not a right to practice or to use the invention; rather, it provided the right to exclude other people.
In other words, the person getting a patent was saying that “for me this is my patent but I am excluding everybody else from doing what I am doing “… This was a key take-away from the Supreme Court’s rejection of the MNC’s patent plea.
While the procedure of filing a patent varied widely between countries, it was necessary to ensure that one made claims that defined the invention, such as novelty and non-obviousness.Sadly, it was not clear what was novelty or what was non-obviousness. These were subjects that were being debated worldwide in the area of intellectual property.
Around this time, the US Supreme Court was also looking at a new genetic pattern for breast cancer and asking whether it was patentable. A similar argument had been tackled by the Indian Supreme Court for about six weeks.
Returning to the definition of innovation, Dr. Piramal said innovation was the development of a new value through solutions that needed new requirements. It looked at what was desirable, possible and viable. Thus, innovation took the idea, the pattern or the new invention and actually made it viable, possible and desirable and made it work in the real world, turning it into something that people would want to have.
“Innovation differs from invention because innovation refers to the use of a better and a novel idea, whereas invention means the creation of that new idea. It also differs from improvement;many people use the word innovation very loosely. They say “Innovation!
I’m doing innovation!”But innovation does not mean doing another process quicker, or doing a process in a shorter time, or in a better way (that is an improvement). Innovation must actually be smarter.”
What was the role of innovation in society? It meant efficiency in everyday practice and convenience. As an emerging technology, it had to stand on the shoulders of previous innovations.
Dr. Piramal played a brief video clip of a documentary on Newton and his enunciation of the law of universal gravitation which ended with the great scientist saying that innovation stood on the shoulders of the giants of science.
Referring to the late Steve Jobs, she said he was a top innovator and used his patents for the iPhone. But as far as telecommunication patents were concerned, Apple was 31st in the list of total patents, the first two being Samsung and Nokia. Therefore, innovation was all about quality and intelligence.
A famous author had said that imagination was the unique capacity to envision that which was not – and therefore it was the foundation of all inventions and innovations.
In the debate on patents, Swati recalls the words of Newton: “We stand on the shoulders of other great scientists”
As for the Indian Supreme Court refusing a patent, she preferred to show another clip, this one of Thomas Alva Edison whose patents were cancelled in his own country by the US Supreme Court.
Continuing where she had left off, Dr. Piramal said that innovation was all about having a dream, about putting one’s mind to doing amazing things and thinking about things that were absolutely new to the world.
“‘That’s how people innovate, by using ideas like mind-mapping. In the old days, the method of innovation was to progress by standing on the shoulders of giants. But in today’s world innovation has changed. Now, innovation is by what is called the wisdom of the crowd, by using the social network, by using micro mentors and ideas which go forward and assured knowledge… we live in a radically different world.”
Having given an overview of innovation, Dr. Piramal turned to another aspect. She recalled that in 1832 Dr. Crookes had invented Lacto Calamine. Decades later, a leading photographer shot a picture of the popular film star Audrey Hepburn for a Lacto Calamine advertisement campaign. That photograph was misplaced, till she had accidentally discovered it in the Harvard Museum.
Dr. Piramal narrated the hard work that had gone into the creation of a new Piramal product called Lacto Calamine Reneu. The Piramal research centre had been working on natural products and had grown from being a domestic business to an international one and then becoming a research driven company.
It had observed that one of the biggest constituents of hyaluronic acid, which was used in all skin creams, did not penetrate the skin; this meant that the beautiful women that one saw in advertisements were using a cream that didn’t go beneath the skin.
“?In a sense, it really doesn’t work, unless you can put some science behind it. And that is here we looked at this new invention by my friend Dr. Bomi Patel. How had he thought about this innovation? Why did he do it? Let him tell you.”
Dr. Patel took the microphone and pointed out that research was “a long game”. He had first conceived of the product eleven years ago in 2002. What he was looking for then was a membrane for edible food.
One read and heard about water shortages, polio eradication and so on, but no one saw the calorific deficit in the world; the lack of calories or food for seven billion people on earth was no small matter.
His research in 2002 was on identifying methods for the enzymatic hydrolisation of waste membranes from all kinds of natural products. In the process, he got interested in a different protein structure that helped fix calcium carbonate.
“So I went from looking at a food product in 2002 to looking at a protein in 2005; the protein project was meant for osteoporosis (another big public health problem), because bones could be helped through calcium-binding. But three years of research has yielded no positive result. work is still going on in my lab but we have still not been successful in isolating that protein.
“But in the midst of that work, I kept isolating some small amino-glycan molecules which were problem. I was trying to get rid of them while trying to isolate the protein. When I looked at it closely, I noticed that there were more molecules (by quantity) but they were one hundred times smaller than the hyaluronic acid molecules.
“In 2005-2006, I thought, what if I take these small hyaluronic acid molecules and have them carry drugs through the skin” They resemble the skin structure, they will easily penetrate the skin nd their (molecular) structure is such that you can place drugs in the middle.”
Having worked for two years on trying to stabilise the amino-glycans and identifying them, he was all set to start a trial for drug delivery through the skin, but…
It so happened that one night, while attending a Rotary Fellowship at the home of PP Arvind and Rashmi Jolly, he found himself sitting next to Dr. Piramal and they started talking about his research. On learning about it, she wondered whether he could put his drug-delivery idea to cosmetic use.
After all, she said, cosmetic products were extremely non-penetrative; they were just topical applications, one put them on, one washed them off; there was nothing else to them.
He jumped at the idea and the opportunity to do something else, something in the cosmetic space. And so his research went in a different direction. Two young women offered him one eye each for studying wrinkles and dark-circle reduction.
The results were positive, rather, they were very good. The idea worked “and the rest is History”. Dr. Piramal’s team took up the research, conducted innumerable trials and put in a tremendous amount of work to get it right, Dr. Patel added.
Dr. Piramal took the microphone once again and described some of the efforts by the Piramal group in the area of social work. It did a lot of work in the field of clean drinking water, mother and child health in six States, education, a BPO in a rural area and so on. The group had also treated 50,000 children in Bombay and worked for the prevention of polio.
After screening another brief clip on Lacto Calamine Reneu, Dr. Piramal summed up her talk by saying that innovation was that which gave people products that worked and that were different from goods, advertisements and improvements.
“India needs innovation and products with a social conscience. I think the Rotary spirit lives on in our family and I hope others will copy us and continue to help Rotary in every way.”
Before ending, she called one of her colleagues, Ms Marie, who lip-synced a song popularised by Audrey Hepburn.
Answering questions, she told Dr. Nayna Dastur that the work on smaller molecules that Dr. Patel had talked about could also be described as nano technology. She added that the product developed contained no chemicals and was well absorbed.
PP Sandip Agarwalla wondered whether decisions (rulings) on patents were sometimes given on humanitarian grounds.
Dr. Piramal said that was a tricky question. While the US Supreme Court was debating whether a breast cancer patent was actually patentable, her own preference was to see that science moved forward. If there was something that was restrictive, then innovation also suffered. However, this debate went on all the time.
“I think we have to weigh both, we have to balance the public needs, which are important, and those which are (in the realm) of science and innovation. As Newton said, we stand on the shoulders of other great scientists.”
Mudit Jain pointed out that biomimicry was gaining importance. While dwelling on innovation, was she looking at nature in order to “imitate” it in the laboratory
Dr. Piramal said she worked on science and nature day in and day out. There were scientists who had actually imitated nature and done some amazing work. “And it (what they are doing) is completely natural, it’s something that nobody had thought about before, “she added.