In a bid to strengthen its research activities, Polyclone Bioservcies a molecular biology and genomics company has invested Rs 75.87 lakh (US $150,000) in setting up two labs. The funds have been sourced from internal accruals. While one of the labs is in Bangalore, the other is located within the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Dharwad in north Karnataka.

The biotech market has been facing a lull for a while resulting out of the global slow down began early this year. But, Polyclone has been seeing several opportunities come its way as international companies are realizing the importance of offshore partners particularly from India to carry out their projects. Therefore, our investments have come in at the right time to tap the promising business development efforts surfacing in our line of business, Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Polyclone Bioservices told Pharmabiz.

In an effort to maximize its revenue generation, the company is also all set to offer genotyping expertise in diagnostic research and agricultural sectors which will be offered to both Indian and global customers. The new lab in Bangalore will provide the service from May.

Genotyping is the process of determining the differences in the genetic constitution of individuals in a species, which helps in identifying presence of specific traits in some individuals like disease susceptibility and resistance which is a path towards the development of personalized medicine.

The global market for genotyping is estimated to be around $700 million. Polyclone would be amongst the few companies in India to offer genotyping services. The company plans to identify and characterize mutations specific to Indian races to develop diagnostic assays for cancers of national importance. Apart from research, it would also offer services for detection of cancer, infectious and genetic diseases to diagnostic labs and hospitals through a centralized setup.

In agriculture, Polyclone would take up select projects in plant genotyping for identification of molecular markers for marker assisted selection and abiotic stress (salinity, drought etc.) resistant cultivar development.

According to Sanjay Bettadpura, chief business officer, Polyclone Bioservcies, with a wide variety of variations at genomic level in India, both in plants and humans, genotyping fits perfectly into our global services and research portfolio. It helps extend our services to mutation based target validation for drug discovery, assay development for diagnostics and pharmacogenomics studies for clinical research. "It also gives us a robust platform to pursue research projects involving polymorphisms relevant to the Indian context, CNV analysis, quantitative methylation analysis, quantitative gene expression and comparative sequence analysis," he added.