The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has identified pharmacogenomics as a high potential segment that needs to be given immediate thrust. It has noted that the rapidly growing segment provides a wealth of information pertaining to defective or missing genes, which call for differentiated medicine – a new avenue for drug research.

According to DBT, the emerging discipline combines both infotech and biotech skills in augmenting high-speed data mining of both genotypic and phenotypic information with a view to evolve new forms of medical diagnostics and therapies.

"Gene regulation and other bio-algorithms will form the core of a new wave of diagnostics that are now being referred to as 'theranostics'. India can be positioned as the hub for differentiated medicine as the country offers one of the most affordable development bases for personalized medicines," it has noted. In fact, the personalized therapies will demand extensive clinical data generated from well-differentiated patient populations. India has one of the most desired disease and patient profiles that can enable such studies. Coupled with this, there is the need for a large number of novel diagnostics based on gene and non-gene based platforms. The DBT strategy paper finds this as large opportunity for Indian biotech companies to pursue. Personalized drugs also address the affordability factor for expensive therapies such as those that are involved with cancer.

According to DBT, some important barriers to improve the clinical utility of such knowledge are the highly complex nature of the problem, little incentive for industry to move to genomic-based approach, and lack of provider education.