Aptuit Laurus, the newly formed contract drug development and life science informatics company, will invest an additional $100 million for further expansion of its activities at Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam and Bangalore by the year-end.

This amount will be raised from its internal resources. For the first year of operations, the company has set a target to generate $11-12 million revenues which will primarily be from software development and informatics services.

Early this week, the US-based Aptuit Inc. had announced a $100 million for newly created joint venture company to take its operations forward with new infrastructure and people.

The additional $100 million will be for consolidation of its operations in three centres. "We will need to augment our scientific personnel from the current 250 to 350 by 2007-end and take it to a total of 500 in 2008. We are expecting a lot of value addition in business with more projects and customers. All these will require additional resources," Dr Satyanarayana, chief executive officer, Aptuit Laurus told Pharmabiz.

Aptuit's has a full-fledged informatics development and support facility in Bangalore at the EPIP Area in Whitefield. Its present strength of 100 personnel comprising software engineers is expected to increase by 25 per cent before the year end.

The Bangalore operations incepted in 1997 is a Centre of Excellence for software design and development of clinical packaging, labelling and supply management product suite 'Clinicopia', which is in use at 8 major pharmaceutical companies and Aptuit's six global clinical packaging facilities. It also provides ongoing maintenance and support to its customers.

The high value 'Clinicopia' suite includes Pharmaceutical Sciences which supports drug discovery to full product development. The Pre-clinical version focuses on pharmacology, drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics, and toxicology. Its clinical packaging and logistics version offers clinical supply chain strategy, project management, clinical manufacturing, blind dose forms, logistics from phase I to IV trails, packaging, labelling, clinical trials material storage, distribution and returns management.

Bangalore will provide the critical development support needed for the next generation of Clinicopia, which is expected to roll out early next year along with other informatics solutions which will enable all Aptuit and Aptuit Laurus customers to share project-based information in a secure, real-time web based environment, stated Kunal Khattar, director, corporate development, Aptuit Inc. The development of this portal will help scientists search and access compounds for the drug development process, he added.

India is looked upon as an important destination. "In fact, we preferred India over China because of the talented scientific pool. The company has devised a 'buy & build' strategy to strengthen its operations through acquisitions and investments in talent, technologies and infrastructure. Now we are in the buying phase. Software development and informatics solutions is a crucial component of our operations. This will allow us to engineer better drug development process, deliver critical expertise to customers in a seamless and global integrated platform," stated Frank Wright, vice chairman, Aptuit, Inc.

The value of the software development and informatics market globally is estimated to be around $200 million and along with Aptuit which has turnover of $300 million the other player globally offering comprehensive backend data in the clinical space is the German-based Werun.