India's biotech messiah is bringing together doctors, researchers and companies to drive innovation in farming and health care
In the dusty industrial area of Udyog Vihar in Gurgaon, the compact chrome-and-glass building that houses the two-year-old Translational Health Science Technology Institute (THSTI) is the scene of quiet action.
At the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Research Centre on the second floor, scientists and doctors are giving the final touches to India’s first community clinical trial (which is conducted directly through doctors and clinics) for a childhood vaccine for rotavirus infection, developed in collaboration with Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech. The infection, which causes diarrhoea, kills at least 100,000 children every year. Some 8,000 children will be part of this late stage trial in Pune, Delhi, and Vellore.
Learning from this will expedite THSTI’s next product, a tuberculosis vaccine, says dean Sudhanshu Vrati.
On the floor right above, at the Paediatric Biology Centre, its head Shinjini Bhatnagar is busy kicking off several public health research projects. Her department is trying to figure out why oral vaccines have poor intake in developing world children. Or, what is the extent of celiac diseases in children in India? The disease results in wheat allergies, and causes stunted growth with several other complications. So, at the Centre for Bio-Design, a stone’s throw away from THSTI, Bhatnagar along with Navin Khanna from the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and a local company, is developing an inexpensive point-of-care diagnostic kit for celiac disease. This will be supplied to all peripheral hospitals.
These are the initial outcomes of a massive collaborative effort among research institutions, hospitals and companies that the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is driving in the National Capital Region. Biotech hubs exist in the country, such as in Bangalore and Hyderabad, but the novelty here is that it’s being built ground-up to encourage practising doctors to work with basic researchers, something which even the US bio-clusters have found hard to manage.
The THSTI is at the heart of this bio-cluster, the brainchild of DBT secretary Maharaj Kishan Bhan. The aim is to drive innovation and create an environment that will take lab research to the market faster.
Half a dozen niche centres have already been set up around THSTI and at least 10 more will come up in the next five years. These centres will also have some degree of autonomy to devise their own programmes. Today they all stand within a 500-metre radius in Gurgaon; in about 18 months the whole set-up will be moved a new 200-acre campus in Faridabad. Besides these, all premier research institutions and universities in the NCR, including AIIMS and Gurgaon district hospital, are signing agreements to share knowledge and expertise.
The THSTI is modelled on the Health-Science-Technology (HST) programme between MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It brings together all research institutions, teaching hospitals and universities in the Boston area to collaborate in solving human health problems. Engineers and scientists take their expertise from the lab to the bedside and bring back learning from the bedside to their benches.
A handful of institutes in Delhi collaborated in life sciences research even before THSTI was set up in 2009, but what makes the cluster different from those “good neighbourhoods”, says Bhan, is that it has common governance to drive functional connectivity between academics, innovation and commercialisation. “A cluster must be larger than the entities, their output should be multiplicative, not just additive,” he says.
Bhan took inspiration from the Banaras Hindu University — the first of its kind in India, set up by Madan Mohan Malviya in 1916. It was part of Malviya’s vision to link up modern developments in science and technology where he often invited persons of outstanding ability from all over the world.
But in the 21st century, Bhan says, India needs “enormous capacity for advance innovation.” Over the next five years DBT plans to spend Rs. 800 crore to Rs. 1,000 crore on it.
What’s at Stake?
The estimated $180 billion global biotech industry can easily trace many of its star performers’ technology to university research.
Biotechnology has thrived in regions where clusters have either evolved naturally as in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco-San Diego in California, or have been largely policy-driven as in Biopolis, Singapore and Cambridge, UK.
By that measure, the $3 billion Indian biotech is a greenhorn. Largely driven by services and contract research, the Indian biotech industry, on its own, is ill-equipped to address India’s health and agri-biotech demands. Besides, large biotech firms are merging with pharma companies as the latter aggressively cuts back on R&D spend. That’s why DBT has embarked on what Bhan calls “a massive experimentation”. He wants to prepare a whole new generation to help develop new drugs, diagnostics and agricultural products for India by 2020.
Creating a Marketplace
(This story appears in the 06 May, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)