India's Lifescience industry is moving to innovation led research and products. Consequently, the information emerging out of biotechnology research is increasing at a rapid pace. The data is often complex and unorganized. Bioinformatics thus plays a significant role in managing, analyzing and interpreting this data.
India's edge
India's information technology (IT) industry is recognized globally as one of the best. The 'big three' Indian software companies - Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro are today world renowned for their IT skills, and several global software companies are establishing their development centres in India. Bangalore is acknowledged as the Silicon Capital of India.
India has a vast pool of talented human resources in computer science and life sciences, with people trained in some of the best institutions in the world as well as in India. Institutes like IITs, IISc., NCBS produce world-class engineers and life science scientists. The big opportunity for India in bioinformatics therefore lies in leveraging her human resource and IT skills.
The bioinformatics sector in India saw a 20% growth in revenues over last year at Rs. 120 crore in 2006.
There are about 50 Bio-IT companies India. Most of the companies are based in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi and are mainly present in clusters where there are large IT, biotech and pharmaceutical companies. The Bio-IT players can be categorized as:
.Core bio-IT/ bio- informatics companies - Jubilant Biosys, Strand Life Sciences, Ocimum Biosolutions, Cytogenomics, Molecular Connections, Bigtec
.Bio-IT divisions of established IT companies - Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant Technologies, Kshema Technologies, Satyam, Mascon Life Sciences
.Bio-IT divisions of International Pharma/ Biotech companies - Affymax, Monsanto, Astra Zeneca
.Bio-IT divisions of the IT Vendors - I B M, Intel, Sun Microsystems
Strand Life Sciences is a premier in silico technologies innovation company and it's products are built on the award winning Avadis platform. Ocimum Biosolutions is a life sciences R&D enabling company with three focus areas, BioIT, Microarrays and Research services. The Microarray division of Ocimum has been recently acquired from MWG Biotech. These include Catalog "OciChip", Custom "OciChip" and microarray services. Cytogenomics, has SilicoCyte, a microarray informatics product and also caters to various bioinformatics product and services.
Tata Consultancy Services has launched BioSuite, a package that covers all the major functional areas of bioinformatics. This package can be used to analyze, formulate, predict and provide solutions to specific areas in computational biology. The package comprises of four focus areas: genomics, protein modeling & structural analysis, simulation and drug design.
Emerging trends
India having entered the product patent regime in 2005 has given the necessary impetus to the bioinformatics industry, as pharma companies will now look at leveraging the cost arbitrage and increasingly outsource core bioinformatics and drug discovery projects to India.
Bioinformatics is an integral part of drug discovery and development and with most pharma-biotech companies investing in innovation led R&D, the scope for in silico bioinformatics is enormous. The bioinformatics sector in India is thus poised for exponential growth in the next 5 years.
(The author is executive - Programme Development ABLE - Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises, Bangalore.)