'Bio-Suite,' a comprehensive bioinformatics product developed by a consortium headed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) under the New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) programme of the Council of Scientific Industrial Research (CSIR), has been formally launched by the president of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam at Hyderabad last week.

Dr Kalam called upon the TCS team to make the product affordable and accessible to small and medium scale biotech companies to develop new biotech products and which cannot afford to develop a separate bioinformatics division. In the coming years, Bio-sciences, Nanotechnology and IT will play a major role in improving the state of health care and medicine, he opined.

Ramadorai, CEO of TCS, said, Bio-suite caters to all the aspects of computational biology from genomics to drug designing and incorporates the latest and publicly known algorithm and has been developed using best software engineering practices. The executive vice-president of TCS, Dr M Vidyasagar said the product would be marketed worldwide and the company wants to foray into the area of computational biology and post genomic drug discovery.

Dr RA Mashelkar, the director general of CSIR, said TCS, which owns the commercial rights on the product, would pay a five per cent royalty to CSIR on all sales. CSIR has funded about Rs 7.85 crore towards the bio-suite project. The Council has given two more projects to TCS. One is to develop a bio-cluster and other is to improve annotation of plasmodium facliparum that causes malaria that will help to develop drug targets. The bio-cluster project is likely to be completed by mid 2005 whereas the malarial project will be completed during 2007.

The Bio-suite, developed over a two-year period by a team of 40 persons at the Advanced Technology Centre at Hyderabad, will include 8 modules including sequence analysis, genome analysis, comparative genomics, 3D modelling, 3D structure manipulations, structural analysis, simulations and drug design.