Under its Contract Research Scheme (CRS), the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has invited proposals from the public and private universities and research institutions to take their proof of concept leads and technologies towards commercial scale.

Through the CRS funding, BIRAC extends support to academic institutes across the country to take forward their research leads through validation and translation by industry. Funding is in the form of grant which is given to both the academic as well as the industrial partner. Under CRS, the industry performs its role as a ‘validation partner’ and engages on a contractual basis while the IP rights reside solely with the academic partner.  One of BIRAC’s major focuses is enabling public funded research to be commercialized and creating effective linkages between academia and industry.

The scheme supports academia for engaging the industry in contract research mode under a specific fee structure for taking forward their leads/technologies towards validation and commercialization. The academia should necessarily have an established lead as evident by scientific data ready for validation. The scheme also supports academia for some specific services such as toxicology studies, gene sequencing studies etc. as a part of validation studies and commercial scale development.

Grant-in-aid is provided to the academia for in-house research which forms a part of validation of the proof of concept. The IP rights reside with the academia. The industry partner will have  first right of refusal for commercial exploitation of the New IP.  However, exploratory research or fundamental discovery with no PoC is not supported.

Academia has to be the primary applicant with one or more partners of which at least one is an industry. The proposers if so required can opt for additional partners from another industry and/or academia.

Bio-medical devices and instruments, healthcare clinical trials, healthcare, healthcare-molecular biology, healthcare-preclinical, healthcare-diagnostics, healthcare-oncology, healthcare-vaccines, biosimilars, biologicals, new drug discovery, development, nutraceuticals, etc are some of the eligible categories and corresponding relevant areas of this proposal which will close on March 17, 2015.

BIRAC, a public sector undertaking under the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), has been set up as an interface agency to nurture innovation research and promote affordable product development through public-private partnership.

Earlier, the CRS was launched by BIRAC to extend support to academia in the form of grant-in aid for validation of the proof of concept (PoC) by an industrial partner.   It was launched in the backdrop of the fact that numerous lab scale research leads are being generated in the academic sector through funding from various agencies like DBT, CSIR, DST, DRDO etc., which have the potential for validation and translation into products.  Currently the academia is capable of limited translational research, however, product development is generally not a part of their mandate. Moreover, they may not have the required infrastructure to take on product development and commercialization activity.