With country's growing profile in contract research services, productivity and cost gains strongly impelling pharma companies to outsource drug discovery to India, and with recent tie-up between GVK Biosciences and Wyeth Pharmaceutials, industry analysts strongly feel that the Indian companies should consider research in biology as important as the research in chemistry.

"Clinical trial is a kind of biological research. Further, metabolism of the body differs from species to species and from individual to individual. Pre- clinical trials are therefore important. Biological research scientists can play major role in pre-clinical studies in areas like discovery and development. The discovery may be described as performing focused research to identify and validate a therapeutic target; the aim of which is to identify molecules that modulate a target according to its therapeutic objective. The development is focused on identifying a compound that modulates the function of the target that was identified in the discovery phase. It utilises all of biochemical, cell biological, molecular, genetic assays/approaches to identify a target, and to validate that target," said Dr. Kiran Dabholkar, consultant gynaecologist with pharma companies.

"The biological research may be responsible for developing and adapting assays for a high throughput screening format that are compliant to examining thousands of compounds. This involves assay design and validation. At this stage, pharmacologists, drug safety and metabolism groups, and toxicology groups are brought into the project to apply their expertise to the goal of identifying compounds that will ultimately become medicines," he adds.

India has been strong in chemistry like medicinal chemistry and other research disciplines of chemistry of the drug, but Indian companies have yet to get research contracts for the biology part of the drug development process. Except for the deal between some pharma companies for the joint development of new drugs, most of the contract research being undertaken by Indian pharma companies is in chemistry research. Biology research is just about starting now. Indian companies can move up the value chain by partnering with overseas pharma companies who have completed 'first-in-man' studies in new drug candidates, feel the experts.