Karnataka's much awaited Biotech Park 'Bangalore Helix' is expected to be commissioned in early 2008. The total investment for the first phase of the project is placed at Rs 11.2 crore. The park will now house the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology and the Centre for Human Genetics which are presently located ITPL, Whitefield, in Bangalore.

The government will hand over the second phase of the construction to the US-based real estate major Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc, recognized as the best developers in the world for biotech parks. The company has built 23 similar ventures in the US. The state government short-listed Alexandria after selection was based on a global tender floated by the State government where they proved the winner of the contract from a group of 21 developers. The land will be leased to the developer for 35 years.

The phase II and III expansion covering 100 acres will have 750,000 sq. ft built- up area. The developer will adopt the BOOT (Build Own Operate Transfer) concept. Phase II and III will be equipped with animal house, wet labs, green house and incubation centre.

Karnataka is also setting up Finishing School for Biotechnology in the PESIT campus. The school is excepted to open in January 2008. This will be a first of its kind in the country. Now with the Finishing School industry can have access to trained manpower, stated MN Vidyashankar, Karnataka secretary for Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology.

The Finishing School will provide an intensive and comprehensive technical training. For the first academic year, 100 seats are offered and we are confident that it will be increased to 500 seats in the coming year, going by the demand for training for fresh graduates, stated the BT secretary.

The school is open to fresh science and biotechnology graduates and post graduates. They will be trained according to industry requirements. In fact the syllabus has been developed in consultation with the industry. We will be able to meet much of the skills shortage, added the State BT secretary.

Current estimates indicate that the attrition level in the industry is around 35 per cent annually and there is also a serious shortfall of trained manpower. The biggest issue is to hire graduates who lack the industry working environment. Huge amount of funds are spent for training graduates and therefore the Finishing School will provide the much-needed relief to address the issue.

In the first six months of 2007, Karnataka biotech sector had 47 new companies setting base in the state and all of it has been in Bangalore. This will bring the total number of biotech industries in the state to 364. Over 70 per cent of the new companies are in the bioinformatics space and remaining have been contract research organizations, liaison offices and production plants.

At the Bangalore Bio 2007, the state government had inked a pact with the University of Deakin, Australia, to set up an advanced training centre to hone the skills of R&D engineers, post graduates and PhDs. The final clearance for the same is pending before the Cabinet secretary, he informed.