BioServe Biotechnologies India Pvt. Ltd., the Indian arm of US-based Bioserve - one of the leading providers of genomic services to global diagnostic market, opened its genotyping, food pathogen detection and disease diagnosis facilities. The state of the art facilities are located in its existing centre at Mallapur in Hyderabad.

The fully equipped facility has been set up with an investment of Rs five crore on a 12000 sq ft area. The company will apply for National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) accreditation for the lab soon. "We are waiting for the proficiency study to be completed. Once it is done we will apply for the NABL accreditation in coming two weeks," Rama Mudali, president of BioServe, said.

"These facilities will implement the technology and assays that have been developed and validated in the USA facility to bring cost effective and sensitive detection methods to provide service to Indian markets," he added.

The company is planning to conduct comparative studies between the Indian and western population and disease prevalence. It intends to utilise its global repository of bio-material (gene samples) consisting of 6, 00,000 odd human DNA, tissue, and serum samples to identify bio-makers for several diseases. The samples are linked to detailed clinical and demographic data from 1,40,000 consented patients. Of the 6, 00,000 samples, nearly 50,000 samples are of Indian population, which is stored in its Indian centre.

Inaugurating the genotyping facility, director of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Dr Lalji Singh said, "Genotyping in Indian population is different from western population. The drugs developed there cannot completely address the diseases prevailing here. One cannot apply an outcome of particular research based on finding from the southern population of the country to northern population. The labs like BioServe are of much importance and more like such are required to facilitate the industry with large scale sample that could be useful in drug development and addressing our own people".

According to Dr Lalji, in a study conducted by CCMB, the Indian population was divided into 20 linguistic groups with numerous sub groups. These groups vary from each other. It can be said that there are around 5000 human population, which is altogether a different species in itself. Dr Lalji stressed on collection and analysis of samples from remote places in the country that could help in coming years.

Dr Sesikeran, director of National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) said, "The food pathogen detection facilities which are currently available in urban areas should be made available in rural India because the requirement is more in rural areas. If this is done there would be a significant reduction in time duration with which we can control a disease before it turns into an epidemic". On an average a food pathogen diction test takes 7-10 days to deliver the results. In this duration a particular virus has done a significant damage.

BioServe currently, has genotyping utilisation agreement to provide population genetics and disease predisposition studies to Harvard University, Bayer College of Medicine, and National Cancer Institute in the USA. The company will have partnership with Elbit Diagnostics to offer molecular diagnostic testing for several infectious diseases initially and plans to expand to cancer and other diseases in coming days.

To a query on revenue stream, Rama said, "This year the Hyderabad centre has generated Rs 3 to 4 crore revenue for the company. We are expecting to generate a revenue over Rs 10-15 crore during next couple of years." The facility currently has 30 people working for it including 16 researchers and scientists. The entire facility is expected to address the spread of epidemic as well as conducting customised studies for drug development companies.