Sadagopan of Indian Institute of Information Technology echoed  the words of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee who said IT meant   India of tomorrow when he said BT meant biotech of tomorrow.  With the arrival of the human genome project genome hunters worldwide  are now trying to marry computer technology and biology (better known as computational biology) to transform medicine and life sciences. The IBM has built Blue Gene to help biologists explore how proteins  fold themselves up into their distinctive shapes. A typical protein   contains thousands of atoms and the forces on every atom must be  evaluated for each time-step. Hence there are global business  opportunities  for bioinformatics and genomics professionals and the Bangalore bazaar  was organised to promote that business indeed.  In the words of Charles Cooney of MIT, USA, a world authority on  biotech, who set the tone for the symposium, the objectives were:

(1) to improve the health care by leveraging information technology  to the growing needs of pharma companies to find better drugs;
(2) Since it takes 8-10 years to find an effective drug before it comes  to the market and costs anywhere between $300-600 million, how can  advances in bioinformatics and genomics cut short the cycle and bring  fast the useful drugs to the market at less cost and more quickly?
(3) How do we use the genomics data, the information on protein  structure and functions?
(4) How do we combine bioinformatics, health information and clinical information? At present nearly 40 per cent of the time  of a typical pharma company is spent on information processing for  effective drug discovery. Mining the data is becoming crucial. IT needs are therefore growing enormously and that is expressed in the  new science of computational biology which is going to hit the  curriculum in technology institutes around the world.
(5) How do we manage the information supply chain? How do we handle bioinformatics, health    informatics, and process informatics?
(6) Finally, the goal is improved health care, the problem is to reduce uncertainty, the approach is  to improve information management like acquisition, improving data mining and interpretation and the significance of the informatics  is better therapeutics to improve the quality of health care.

But as we kept listening to outstanding speakers one after the other, the concern for health care was almost sidelined except by some  who could dem ystify the science of informatics and genomics for the human well-being. The completion of the human genome sequence and  that of many other animals has led to the need to understand the   function of all the proteins coded for by the genes. In the words  of Tim Harris of the Structural Genomix, structural genomics uses  genome information to speed up the process of obtaining the three  dimensional structure of the encoded proteins.  Not only will this enable the prediction of the function of many more proteins but it will also allow the design and synthesis of  many new drugs for those proteins which are targets for drug discovery  which is described as functional genomics. According to Indra Sanyal  of Genome Science, USA total sequencing of the human genome has a tremendous impact on science and would result in opening the floodgates
of research to discover novel therapeutics to meet unmet medical  needs. He claimed that in his company they have established an  efficient high-throughput functional genomics process that enables the expediting  of discovery and the clinical evaluation of new therapeutics. When  he was asked whether lab work would be replaced by the emerging  bioinformatics in the  days to come Mathew Woodwork flatly said No, in fact only the nature of lab work would change. The recurring theme was how we could leverage the bioinformatics  for evolving what was called ‘personalised medicine’. This sounded  more like a designer medicine tailor-made to a particular care-seeking  patient. It may or may not happen. This is where majority of the  speakers avoided the questions on bioethics although they were very   concerned with cross discipline and relationship network, using  overlapping domains and what have you. Bioethics should also be seriously discussed  by bioinformatics pundits because clinical trials are becoming more
and more critical. There is so much epidemological data that has  been generated in the past decade by WHO-supported research agencies around the world on all types of diseases and unless that is all  analysed it would be a waste of such valuable data for drug discovery. There was no discussion on how clinical trials are done, on whom   and with what consequences. Obtaining informed consent of the person   subjected to trials is a simple thing. What about trials on animals?  What happens to them when something goes wrong or are never revealed? We still remember the horror stories of injectable contraceptive  trials conducted in UP heartland some years ago. Very few drug  companies reveal stories of failed drugs to the public.
In the words of Charles Rockland of RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, biology is not   like engineering – precise and defined. Heterogeneity is the problem  and there are no clear-cut boundaries piecing the heterogeneous  elements is the big job in bioinformatics. In all this bioethical issues are  generally forgotten.  At this point of the discussion Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Spotfire  talked about how decisions were taken in actual practice. He said  that even now 80 per cent of the decisions are made based on intuition. In his characteristic style he said that there is a tornado of data  and the clients need help to analyse the waves of data coming every   second. A time has come when pharmas have to ‘outsource innovations’   and the challenges are basically to turn data into information,
organise  and relate information into cross domain interrelationships and finally
turning those into good decisions. Skills are involved in presentation  and the traditional presentation on pie charts, etc, is dead now  and does not work any longer in genomics science.  The entire biotech business is now in the range of some $80 billion  and the issues on venture funding were debated hotly in the symposium. The most incisive and frontal attack was made by CII’s chief economist  Onkar Goswami who said that venture capitalists have in their pockets  as much as two and half billion dollars for India and they just do  not invest in biotech ventures because they do not know what it is  all about. This is primarily because scientists do not know how to  communicate with the venture capitalists. Many bright science ideas  are not converted into business products and services. Despite the   outstanding science graduates turned out by Indian Institute of Science   (IISc) none of their scientists know how to leverage science with business.
Goswami asked what prohibits the IISc from forming a  bioinformatics  company with 51 per cent initial share capital. Basically our  scientists  do not know how to create wealth out of science and ways of  corporatising  without sacrificing science talent. In this context the interesting  experience of ‘transfer of technology’ unit of the California Institute  of Technology (CALTECH) in the US was shared with the audience by  Richmond Wolf, associate director of the unit. CALTECH, launched  in 1995, has focused on entrepreneurial start-ups and has so far  concluded 27 equity deeds. In such start-ups it is not just the  technology  that works but economics and the nature of relationship with the  faculty. The academic bureaucracy does not help in such ventures  and the spirit of CALTECH is to combine the three roles of a faculty in one – technologist, entrepreneur and manager. Today CALTECH has  earned $20 million from this unit. Instead of endowment chairs now they want more such ventures and stock options for the faculty and the institue.  Linked to this whole business of venture capital was the vexed issue  of patents and intellectual property regimes. Neil Philips, the senior   patent authority of AstraZeneca, UK, who analysed some of the  implications was quite evasive when I asked about the havoc created by patented  anti-retrovirals (ARVs) like AZT drugs in the treatment of HIV/AIDS  by US drug companies. When half the population of Africa is being  wiped out due to HIV/AIDS there is no sense in sticking to patents  for more than say five years and any pharma willing to bring down  the cost should be allowed to produce the drug. Patent protection  is set at 20 years and governments including developing countries  will have to allow the protection of products and process by 2006. TRIPS is supposed to safeguard public health but it is not doing that. In India compulsory licensing could enable our country to   manufacture  a drug in emergencies without the permission of the patent holder   provided that “adequate remuneration is given to that company”. CIPLA, India has come forward to do this for US AZT manufacturer, but it  has not succeeded yet.  The final theme was the human resource and people factor in the whole   business of bioinformatics and genomics. The volume of data in public  data repositories is growing rapidly. In May 1999 the public archives contained about 700 million bases of the human genome. In May 2000  the figure was more than 3 billion. So pharma companies are  establishing  their own databases of genomic and proteomic information. In Germany, rest of Europe and US, there is shortage of computational biologists  which will continue for years. The tacit and evolving nature of  bioinformatics  requires the physical presence of individuals who can work in the area within the research environment. Software and models are often   specific to the research agenda of the firm and thus cannot be  purchased   from outside. The Bangalore bazaar on bioinformatics left a ray of  hope for the students and smart entrepreneurs who want to venture  into these fortune-making ventures. Those like me wondered what would  happen to people’s health. 

Research Profile of Biotechnology -Activities in India

India has wide variety of companies and research institutions in
the field of Biotechnology. The 'Research Profile of Biotechnology
Activities: A Directory" is your guide to the Indian Biotechnology
sector and is useful to Scientists, Industrialists and International
agencies. This Biotechnology Directory contains information about
the institutes, which are doing research in the field of Biotechnology.
This database contains details of institutes with specialized research
areas, on going and completed projects, experts working in the
institutes and Biotechnology equipment etc. List of publications of each institute
is also available for further studies. World Wide Web version of
this directory is hosted on the server of the Bioinformatics Center,
University of Pune. This project is funded by the Department of
Biotechnology, Government of India.

Biotechnology Directory database is searchable on various fields
such as Institutes, projects, experts and funding agency to name
a few.
1. INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE BANGALORE
2. J.N.U. DELHI
3. PUNE UNIVERSITY
4. CENTER FOR MOLECULAR BIOLOGY HYDERABAD

Note: This Article is Written by Manu N Kulakarni, and suggested by a friend to communicate to the world. We are using this to update student community without any commercial intentions.