Advinus Therapeutics' newly built corporate office and development centre in Bangalore, which was commissioned in February this year, was formally inaugurated by Tata chairman Ratan Tata. The company has invested Rs 200 crore for the new facility.

The facility spreads over an 8-acre campus with around 210,000 sq. ft of built-up area. The facility is the only one of its kind in the country to provide an end to end pre-clinical development along with capabilities in agro chemical development. It holds good lab practices accreditation from the German, Dutch and Indian regulatory authorities. It is also 21CFR part II compliant. Further, it is also certified by the AAALAC International facility which already conducted 2700 studies.

The company which was formed in 2005 set up a Greenfield drug discovery centre at Pune in August 2006. This facility only focuses on in-house drug discovery activities and the Bangalore facility will handle drug development. Once the drug targets are identified at Pune the know-how would be transferred to Bangalore unit for upscale. Also contract services in pre-clinical and clinical studies are offered. The offering will help Advinus to generate the required revenues.

At the opening of the facility, Dr Rashmi Barbhaiya, managing director, and CEO, Advinus Therapeutics stated that the company is ideally positioned along with global life sciences majors in advancing a robust pipeline of pharma products. The state-of-the-art labs are uniquely positioned to leverage the India advantage.

Under the company's partnership model, it is associated with Merck and Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), a not-for-profit R&D organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, have entered into a collaboration for discovery and development of novel therapies. It will focus on three therapeutic categories of metabolic disorders (diabetes, cardiovascular and obesity), inflammatory (asthma, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), rheumatoid arthritis. Osteoarthritis and psoriasis neglected diseases namely, (malaria, TB, Leshmaniasis, dengue fever and leprosy). It has also associated itself with Veeda for clinical studies on humans.

According to Advinus chairman R Gopalakrishnan, the Tata Group has partnered with a team of technocrats and the Advinus forms the knowledge arm of the Group like Tata Elxi, TCS and Tata Technologies.

In his address the Tata Group chief Ratan Tata stated that the entire gamut of drug discovery, drug development, biotechnology, bioinformatics and life sciences have found a place in India. The Tata Group has helped these initiatives and it is a long term commitment in terms of funds and value-addition.