The Delhi-based Life Technologies (India), a molecular biology and cell culture research kit company, is firming up plans to start a laboratory in the country to provide DNA analysis techniques for wet workshops and also for making it a research base for the company's products. According to Rajan Sahni, managing director, LTIL, once the laboratory is set up, it would also have extensive training sessions as part of its services.
The company, which has a strategic initiative with Germany's Qyagen to market a range of imported research kits under the brand name 'AuPreP' in India, is considering the domestic market as promising one going by the potential buyers in the biotech-pharma research and science institutions here.
LTIL's range of 20 products is opted by the Indian research community for being cost-effective, tailor-made for customers and easy to use. The products which are imported are sold at 30-35 per cent lower than the cost of the products priced abroad and for bulk orders the prices are reduced further by 25 percent from the Indian rates.
The company has made a significant presence in the Indian market by bagging orders from Indian Institute of Science, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Metahelix, Syngene of the Biocon India Group, Monsanto in Bangalore, Indian Institute of Immunology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Ranbaxy in Delhi, CCMB in Hyderabad, among others. At the Indian Institute of Science, the company has made its presence felt in the departments of Biochemistry and Microbiology & Cell Biology where scientists are now able to advance research faster with the efficiency of the AuPreP kits.
LTIL, an ISO 9001certified, is a major player in the Indian research instrumentation market. Much of the competition is from abroad, Rajan Sahni, managing director, told Pharmabiz.com. The main strengths of the company are its market-research team and sales force who look at innovations in research kits that are the latest trends in the global research space. The affordable prices of products help the country to save foreign exchange. Among the 20 products of AuPreP range Nuclei Acid Purification, AuPreP Gene or DNA extraction, Gel extraction and PCR purification, Spin Miniprep, Genomic extraction and Total RNA extraction kits are well-known. Sahni wished to keep the sales earnings confidential.
"The kits provide simple, fast and cost-effective methods to extract and purify DNA from agarose gels, clean up PCR products, obtain good yield from overnight bacterial culture and isolation of DNA from blood, various tissue samples, yeast, bacteria and virus used in molecular biology, genomics, plant research drug discovery and vaccine research," he said.
Sahni said that the market value world wide for the research kits is huge and in India its value is pegged between US $5-6 million, which is expected to grow in the next five years to around US $20 million. The company hopes to launch three products shortly in the domestic market where the demand is growing considerably. "We plan to open up prospects in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal as well soon," he said.