Lab automation major has invested Rs 8 crore to set-up Probiosys Centre for Excellence which is a full-fledged finishing school for life sciences in Bangalore. The company will infuse another Rs 40 crore to Rs 50 crore over the next months for its second phase of expansion that will focus on contract research. The company has raised bank loan to finance the project.

Probiosys Centre for Excellence will facilitate perpetual learning for fresh graduates and industry personnel apart from be a platform for training the trainers. According to the company, the Centre is the country's first finishing school for lifesciences sector and it will also be a technology incubation centre.

The Centre has a capacity to conduct courses for 2,000 students annually. To begin with it intends to have 600 candidates for training.

The courses include Career Management which covers orientation, short term, domain based, courses on pharma micro QC,QA, food and agro, cell culture and tissue engineering and analytical chemistry. Other offering skill-based training and long term courses.

The fees will be around Rs 20,000 for short term (5-7 days, Rs. 45,000 for skill based (7-15 days) and Rs 1 lakh for professional exercise programme of 6-8 months.

The key objective of Probiosys is to mould the fresh graduates keen to pursue a career in labs of pharma, biotech, food-beverage and cosmetic industry. With the increasing demand for qualified life sciences personnel in the country, the availability of quality talent is decreasing. To minimize and eliminate this gap, at Probiosys will impart training in emerging technology and high intend automation and impart international quality procedures for meeting real time industrial and research environment, said Bhanu Prakash, managing director and CEO, Automed Systems.

The 12-year-old Automed with revenues of Rs 10 crore in last fiscal is a BVQI and ISO9001-2000 certified company offering an entire gamut of instrumentation products though leading international companies in the areas of cell culture, clean room to support over 100 pharma and biotech companies in India.

The entry into education sector was a practical fit primarily because it will help industry entrants and existing personnel to update skills and have hands-on exposure to emerging technologies, added Prakash.

The focus area of Probiosys will be training, research, projects and consultancy.

The facility has a fully compliant ISO-FDA lab. There are two class 10,000 clean rooms, molecular biology, cell culture labs. In addition, to offering candidates real time experience of a bio-pharma industry, Automed intends to use the infrastructure to enter the contract research space. The facility will also allow customers to calibrate the experiments on new instruments which have been purchased at Automed.

Probiosys is also in discussion with pharmacy and biotechnology colleges to have its students being trained at the Centre of Excellence or use its expertise to bridge gaps in the existing syllabus, stated Prakash.