The Hyderabad-based Kasyap Technologies, a virtual R & D company, has set its eyes on biologicals contract research in the near future and plans to emerge as a product development company in the long-run.

The company in the short-term is planning to focus on biologicals contract research with interests in biomarkers and RNAi technologies. It plans to develop database on RNAis and help companies working on gene therapy, P Jayaraman, director-Operations, Kasyap Technologies, said.

The company is driven by a team of techno-managerial consultants addressing IT solutions for Life Sciences and Industrial automation sectors. Its wide range of services include process consulting, technology consulting, application development, IT infrastructure engineering, commodity high performance computing etc.

It has launched several products for life sciences sector. XChemi is an effort to integrate various sources of data literature and knowledge pertaining to drug discovery chemistry. To address the needs of functional genomics community, Kasyap developed a pathway construction tool, 'MetCon', for pathway construction, analysis, visualization and simulation. ClinLIMS is an application tool to support the process workflow of Clinical module of Laboratory Information Management System for bio-equivalence and bioavailability studies.

Last year, Kasyap Life Sciences launched Kasyap Technology Consortium, which today comprises of 75 leading scientists from life sciences industry, academia and CSIR laboratories. The idea of such consortium started during end of 2003. One of the major objectives of this consortium is creation of virtual R & D capabilities through networking of like-minded scientists contributing projects that will bring unique identity to India. Kasyap is acting as a facilitator for such networking, by building people capacities, improving channel partnership to enable technology transfers, Jayaraman said.

The company is organizing a conference, christened, Focus India 2006, during the third week of March, 2006 at Hyderabad. This event will be a step towards networking of minds to increase outsourcing opportunities.

Intellectual property protection, project management capabilities, disciplines of process standards and meeting standards are the areas that Indian contract research companies should lay emphasis, he added.