Bangalore is a preferred destination for Bioinformatics start-ups. Several leading universities and biotechnology and information technology (IT) companies in the US and Europe, are looking at India and particularly Bangalore for joint ventures, to market solutions and also body-shop for scientific manpower. Several university professors from abroad who are incubating start-ups at their universities are looking for technology tie-ups with Indian universities and companies because they are convinced that the Indian scientific community has the credentials: strong base in traditional sciences and rapid strides in information technology.
In Karnataka, Bioinformatics is a key growth sector in the Knowledge segment, which is dominated by information technology. The global Bioinformatics market is currently pegged at $2 million. It is estimated to grow to $ 60 million by 2005. India's share in the market is 5 percent.
A section of scientists at the Indian Institute of Science said that that almost every biotech company abroad is investing a minimum of $ 15-20 million to set up Bioinformatics divisions. The demand for bioinformaticians worldwide is one million. Today, there are 1,000 bioinformaticians in Europe and 3,000 in the US. The brainpower to manpower ratio is 80:20 for start-up companies to take off. US universities are working out attractive education-employment strategies to attract Indian students who have a background in information technology and a good grasp of biology. The training imparted by them would mould them into bioinformaticians, who are scarce today.
The scientific community in Bangalore is looking at commercial initiatives for a slice of a cake in the international Bioinformatics business scene. Research scientists require simple methods for complex data handling in drug discovery and need novel user oriented tools. In this direction, applications are being developed for the Indian market, where the scientists are hooked on to the IT applications for easy interface, explains Dr Ahlberg. Dr Scot D. Kahn, vice president of Life Sciences Research and Development of Molecular Simulation, USA who was in India to market MSI life science products.
The importance of Bioinformatics is gaining rapid acceptance and Bioinformatics groups comprising computational biologists, computer scientists/engineers are being constituted at the universities, pharma-biotech companies and at national research institutes, said Dr. G Padmanabhan, scientist emeritus and former director, Indian Institute of Science.
There are around six Bioinformatics companies in Bangalore- Strand Genomics, SysAriss Software, Molecular Connections, Jubilant Biosys, Bigtec and the latest entrant is the Institute of Bioinformatics a non-profit organisation set up by the 'The Genomics Research Trust' in collaboration with the University of Hopkins at the International Tech Park, Whitefield, Bangalore.
Bangalore is the information technology capital of India and Bioinformatics is an extension to this specialised field where companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro, TCS and Kshema Technologies, have started life sciences divisions. The city is also the hub of pharma-biotech companies like AstraZeneca, Biocon India, The Himalaya Drug Company, Micro Labs, Saint Life Pharmaceutical Research Laboratories and research institutes like the Indian Institute of Science, National Centre for Biological Sciences and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.
"We have the ingredients -manpower and infrastructure to attract global players to enter into collaborative agreements. The challenge is to identify competencies and provide the competitive-edge. Bioinformatics is the new sunrise industry where IT professionals and biotechnology scientists can diversify. Some of the world's major biotech and IT companies are forging a synergy for business developments in this segment," said, DB Inamdar, minister for information technology and biotechnology, government of Karnataka.
According to Ms. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, head of the Vision Group on Biotechnology in Karnataka and also the chairperson & managing director, Biocon India Group, there is a lack of skilled personnel in Bioinformatics. "World wide the demand for manpower in this related area was over a million. Any one in India who worked towards a duo specialization of biotechnology and software development would be in great demand shortly."
Realising the need to meet the dearth of manpower in the area, Karnataka's Vision Group on Biotechnology started an Institute of Bioinformatics & Applied Biotechnology at the International Technology Park (ITPL), Whitefield in Bangalore to catalyse the growth of the emerging global opportunities in informatics and biotechnology in Karnataka. The key objectives of the IBAB are to incubate start-ups in Biotechnology & Bioinformatics, conduct courses and programmes in Bioinformatics, carry out R&D in genomics, genetics, high throughput screening of select microbial and plant biodiversities and contract research for industry.
Some of the leading pharma companies drugs companies like Glaxo SmithKline Beecham, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Reliance Life Sciences are hunting for Bioinformaticians while smaller pharma-biotech companies have difficulties to hire the personnel they want, pointed out Vijay Shukla director of the New Delhi-based Bioinformatics Institute of India He plans to open up a Bangalore branch to start three distance-learning programmes of one year each for postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics, postgraduate diploma cheminformatics and Bioinformatics.
Vivek Kulkarni, secretary, department of information technology and biotechnology, government of Karnataka, said that that Bioinformatics and genomics are all about using super computing skills and software to understand how genes make different body proteins, including haemoglobin, enzymes and hormone influence body functions and how to design therapeutic interventions based on this knowledge. "Bioinformatics is still in its nascence in India but the country's strong information technology base provides an enormous opportunity for companies in India and more so in Bangalore to make rapid strides for exponential growth in this emerging sector," he added.
The application of information technology in life sciences would provide better healthcare and cost effective medical treatment, said to Professor Charles L Cooney, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering and co-director of the programme on the pharmaceutical industry and associate director, for industrial associates at the biotechnology processing engineering centre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA who was in India early this year. "The synergy of IT [information technology] and BT [biotechnology] will bring about a revolution in healthcare industry."
Professor Cooney, said that life sciences and R&D has become a information science, facing the same challenges as industries such as nuclear physics, financial services and oil & gas. Information technology will help will help handle the large data of the biotechnology research with new algorithms, multidimensional sequences and complicated graphics. "All this would focus towards solving the fundamental problems of healthcare," he said.
Professor Charles Cooney informed the information technology sector will develop for biotechnology industries a variety of informatics strategies to allow distributed access and collaboration across systems in the 10-100 terabyte range. "In life sciences, cost-effective ways to integrate and manage large complex applications and databases need to be found urgently to maintain competitiveness, especially in research and development.
"We are examining the practical role that data warehouses, data warehousing and data mining, visualisation and strategic outsourcing can play for life science in Bioinformatics, and the give the world the answer to affordable medical treatment and fast diagnosis" informed Professor Cooney.
Bioinformatics can revolutionise healthcare industry. Bioinformaticians in Indian working on possibilities to develop a chip to diagnose the genetic infectious disorders. If it were introduced in India at an affordable cost, it would revolutionise healthcare in the country, said Dr. Padmanabhan.