Prescient Biosciences has set up an advanced training centre at a cost of Rs 5 crore to offer focused short term courses of five to 10 days for pharma-biotech industry professionals.

The facility, in the Peenya Industrial Area of Bangalore, is gearing up to train 500 candidates annually. There are two labs for Computational biology and Wet lab. Bio-instrumentation majors including Carl Zeiss, Waters, Eppendorf, Metrohm and Millipore have supported the training centre.

The operations which kicked off early this year provides short-term and advanced courses: 'Biotechnology in Genetic Engineering' is a five-day course focusing on computational skills. Candidates can strengthen their know-how in gene manipulation, through in-vitro engineering of genes using a variety of molecular biology tools. Biotechnology in Drug Design and Bioassays is a 10-day course focusing on screening procedures and standardizing a cell-line based bioassay in pharma and biotech labs. 'Fermentation Technology' course will be started in a weeks. There will be maximum of 10 students for each course. The fees for outstation candidates with accommodation is Rs 25,000 and for local students it is Rs 20,000.

The courses are for post graduates and bio-pharma engineers seeking to sharpen skills as their prepare for positions in industry. In order to create industry ready professionals, Prescient has pioneered an initiative to train college and university teachers along with the industry personnel to educate the former on the industry needs.

A team of experienced faculty from abroad along with professionals from the industry and research institutes in the country will help students tackle problem oriented experiments in tissue culture, microscopy, bio-informatics, bioprocess filtration, purification and chromatography.

Presently, out of the annual 10,000 life science post graduates coming out of colleges in India only 25 per cent are employable. Industry is not able to infuse manpower for lack of expertise among new entrants. Therefore companies are facing a serious shortfall. Prescient provides not just a completion certificate, but a skill analysis sheet which indicated specific competence of the candidates, thus helping industry to select fast, stated RS Annadurai, director, Prescient Biosciences Pvt Ltd told Pharmabiz.

The current competitive job scenario demands comprehensive expertise in every facet of the pharma-biotech industry. The objective is to bridge the existing gap and create bench ready workforce. This is where specialized courses are designed to impart hands-on experience to fresh candidates and existing industry personnel in molecular-cell biology, drug discovery, computational biology, bioprocess and downstream processing, he added.