Syngene has dedicated research facilities for Amgen, Baxter, and Bristol Myers Squibb – how did the sites cope with pandemic-related turbulence? Any new operating models that are now here to stay?

Dr Bhalgat: Thanks to the right decisions made by the local authorities and the overall pandemic management team from the [Indian] government, we were classified as an essential facility because we produce and support research of drugs and were also doing testing.

Given all of that, we didn't really have to shut down our facilities for more than a couple of weeks, which we were able to cope with by making sure that there isn't any loss of actual time that is needed for productivity.

We came up with many changes not just for the dedicated centers but for essentially serving all of our clients.

This includes a key change, which is we started operating in shifts. That shift operation gave us the opportunity to make sure that people are working and working almost around the clock and with their full level of safety, because you don't have as much density in the labs and in our manufacturing facilities.

All of that literally helped in terms of making sure that we were now operating in a completely different model, because working in shifts in a research environment is not very common in any part of the world. We were able to make that operational and deliver through that model.

We continue to operate in a certain number of areas with the shift model because it is a more efficient approach and I don't believe that we should yet say that we are completely out of the pandemic.

Additionally, we did a lot of work with regard to making sure that there is speed delivered through some of the staff that had to do data analysis, for example, doing that more remotely. Again, that kept things working around the clock.

Normally, what data review may have happened in a certain time or a zone now could happen in a different time or a different zone because of the fact that we were working around the clock in shifts.

In addition, there were a number of things we had to do to make this actually a success. We went from two cafeterias to 20, effected a 10-fold increase in the number of buses that we were using to bring our staff and a dramatically different model that we were able to put in place on contact tracing, sanitization, and both on-site and remote reporting of [workers'] temperature to make sure that we are proactively not having infected staff come on site.

We were one of the few companies that was continuously testing their staff to make sure that you are limiting and catching early, anybody who's infected coming onto the site and therefore, acting as a focal point for additional spread, along with many other components of visitor management.

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