The Swedish drug major AstraZeneca has opened its state of the art Indian research facility in Bangalore for its tuberculosis drug research programme. The new discovery center in Bangalore is one among its nine R&D centers located in five countries world wide and will work closely with the AstraZeneca's global network of research and development (R&D) centers especially the genomic and infection research centers in Boston, USA and Alderley Park, UK. The company is working towards it candidate drug which is hopefully expected to be out by 2006 and the final much awaited tuberculosis drug in 2010.

The new facility located on the Bellary Road was opened by D B Inamdar, minister for information technology, biotechnology and tourism. Government of Karnataka.

The company's investment for the drug discovery in Bangalore, included $10 million to create a new research laboratory. Now that the center has been created, the company is investing in another $30 million over the next five years for lab equipment and operation costs. The discovery center has 67 scientists from all over India and 30 percent are from Bangalore. It is expected to increase its scientist's pool to 100 shortly and enhance the scientific pool further depending on the progress of research, said Dr. T Balaganesh, head of the AstraZeneca India Research facility.

AstraZeneca's programme in Bangalore will involve public-and private collaboration with academia and utilize the latest technology in drug discovery and development to find new candidate drugs that are better than the existing treatments, active with shorter duration therapy and active against latest disease and resistance organisms It will work on the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis which causes tuberculosis. We are looking at specific selective therapies, which could be tailor-made to address the challenges of the disease, which affects over two million people in India, said Sir Tom Mckillop, chief executive officer, AstraZeneca PLC.

Our focus is on the diseases of the developing world and will look at the other infectious diseases in the third world once we are successful with the tuberculosis research. We are currently the only research, manufacturing and marketing pharma multinational company in India. The specific reasons for looking at India are that access to world class scientists, said Sir Tom Mckillop. However, we are not in a position to disclose whether the likely drug candidate will be manufactured by out manufacturing facility, he added.

“We evaluated on a number of reasons before short listing on the research for a drug for tuberculosis among other diseases like malaria and filarial, said Dr. Balaganesh. The new drug is undergoing extensive research and scientists are looking t replacing the existing 4-drug (Rifampicin, Ionazid, Ethambutol and Pyrazinamide)regimen therapy of six months, which is effective but difficult for patients to continue. We wish to find a combination that will reduce the therapy to less than four months, which will bring down the cost of treatment by 30 percent for every patient. Besides it will also increase the reach of the current WHO (World Health Organization ) DOTS programme from the existing 25 percent to 50 percent world wide. We are also hoping that the new drug will have minimum side-effects and also be compatible to HIV Mycobacterium tuberculosis cases. The strategy of our research is to go in for bioinformatics driven intracellular identification of novel pathways. The dynamics of this disease eradication programme is to eradicate the microbe from specific locations and reduce the treatment time, explained Dr. Balaganesh.

The new facility spread over 18,000 sq.m of laboratory space has an animal house which is one of a kind apart from an Ivan Ostholm Biomedical Information Service has taken exactly 16 months to be completed. There was a resource team from Sweden to monitor the progress.

To increase its presence world wide, the company has opened a manufacturing plant in China and will increase it presence here with a sales and marketing wing, said Sir Tom Mckillop adding that plans are chalked out to invest in Brazil and Egypt.