Eyeing the opportunities in the drug discovery space thrown opened by new patent regime, the lab equipment major Waters India, has geared up activities.

The Liquid Chromatography-Mass spectrometer Analyzers (Acquity-Quatro Premier, Acquity -QT of Premier) are for trace level impurities identification, characterization and profiling. The Solid Phase Extraction (SPE) cartridges Oasis and Sepak are also widely used in the discovery labs. The Informatics solutions packages such as Empower Network,(ELan) Elab Note book, AWM(Analytical Work flow Manager) and SDMS(Scientific Data Management System) are "21CFR part 11Compliant ready" offers speed and efficiency of lab automation to ensure faster "time to market". In addition, Waters CAG (customer assurance group) provides engineering, validation, applications and educational support to ensure high asset utilization to drive down overall costs.

"A large number of NDAs (New Drug Application) submitted and accepted by USFDA are from India, which reflects the amount of discovery and development work happening here. The demand is for high quality, high throughput and high speed analyzers combined with good information management support. The market demand is certainly growing at high double digit," Kochu Sankar, General Manager (Marketing), Waters (India) Pvt. Ltd said in an email interview.

Delving into the prevailing trends in the drug discovery technology space, Sankar stated, "Most of the key pharma companies both Indian and MNCs are investing in big way for discovery labs."