The Department of Biotechnology’s (DBT’s) Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) teamed up with the Wellcome Trust, which is a global charity entity in the UK, to scout for  fresh proposals in translational medicine in the area of diagnostics for infectious diseases. Both BIRAC and Wellcome Trust are jointly approaching the scientific labs, research institutes, medical institutions, besides the bio-pharma companies which will need to submit the applications by May 1, 2014, to be a part of the project.

India has been home to several innovative diagnostic kits for infectious and tropical diseases. like for instance recently, InnAccel, an innovation accelerator company bagged a license technology transfer from the Biotech Consortium of India Limited (BCIL) for the production of ‘Noxeno’ a device for nasal foreign body removal. Earlier bio-med start-ups like MicroXlabs came up with a miniature device to calculate blood cells. Bengaluru-based XCyton Diagnostics brought to the market its Syndrome Evaluation System (SES) to diagnose secondary infections like  Sepsis that occur as a result of dengue and chikunguniya in merely seven hours. Hyderabad’s  Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) developed a DNA based diagnostic chip to identify any of the 15 pathogens that cause eye disease.

Now the key objective of both BIRAC and Wellcome Trust through this initiative is to fund the translational projects to deliver safe and effective healthcare products for India at affordable cost through collaborative research. The effort is to accelerate the pace of research and development, encourage innovation and give a fillip to technology development. It is an India-led project where the lead applicant in the proposal will be an Indian entity either by itself or by partnerships including where the opportunity exists to build on established collaboration or develop a consortium.

From BIRAC, the project is led by Dr Jyoti Shukla and Dr Shireshendu Mukerjee at Wellcome Trust.

The two organisations have called for projects which must take into account the criteria for affordability for presence of a development path that maximises wide-spread adoption and for realistic possibility of a downstream uptake by a follow-up partner.

Applications that encourage innovations by bringing together researchers from both public and private sectors as well across all scientific disciplines such as medicine, physics, chemistry, computing, engineering and materials sciences are encouraged.

The scheme also encourages cross-border research and development collaborations to promote delivery of affordable healthcare technologies for the India and emerging markets.