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.)
We have many great research Institutes from CSIR and DBT running from years. How many drugs are in market as a result of research done in India. Nothing will change by opening couple of more institutes. Its wastage of taxpayers money. Better is to overhaul the existing institutes and do something productive.
on May 6, 2011Bangalore has the highest venture capital funding for biotech according to http://www.bangaloreitbt.in/ Over 50% of biotech companies in India are based in Bangalore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceuticals_in_India#Biotechnology_statistics And yet it doesn't have much in the way of biotech institutes of national importance. This is a typical example of the disconnect between academia and industry that is plaguing India and that which THSTI wants to address. What industry-academia connect are we talking about? If anything, the institutes need to be closer to industry rather than babu-dom. But this being India, the reverse happens. Result being the organic development of an industrial cluster suffers while babus attend conferences all year round in NCR and abroad.
on May 5, 2011Observer: Couple of points: 1) As for new institutes, DBT has (is still work in progress) set up a smaller cluster in Bangalore which is focused on stem cells. Thereâs a new institute and a tech tool providing non-profit organization which also coordinate with a few centers in Vellore and Hyderabad where DBT is pushing stem cell work. Thereâs also a brand new institute in genomics and human genetics that DBT has supported in Bangalore. So itâs looking for local expertise to seed centres. 2) As for THSTI, it really needed a big teaching and research hospital like AIIMS. Most hospitals in Bangalore/Hyderabad/Pune are corporate hospitals with little or no research capability or interest. 3) One idea could also be to develop the life sciences (Iâm not calling it biotech) capability in NCR as all cities -- Bangalore, Hyderabad and Puneâhave their own biotech parks, which donât quite work like parks. Simply moving companies from outside to the inside, with no addition in the net value, isnât what a (biotech) cluster is about. Hope this answers some of your questions.
on May 6, 2011After a long time, we are getting to read something that gives hope, esp to young aspiring folks in the country. What is key in this effort is the attention to the 'collaboration' detail that Bhan is giving. Well-meaning people in the govt should encourage him to continue for one more term of five years so that at least a group of institutions in the country learns to deliver cross disciplinary results.
on May 4, 2011It is a pleasure to read about herculean efforts of people like Maharaj Kishan Bhan. What he is trying to do is inspiring to even a simple trader like me. We need more bureaucrats like him in our country. But I have a very humble suggestion to make. Here the model with active monitoring will work better if we concentrate on a particular or most common lifestyle disease like diabetes in a particular cluster.
on May 4, 2011Can the Central Government for once think beyond Delhi/NCR? Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune are the hotbeds of biotechnology in India and yet the Translational Health Science Technology Institute is setup in Gurgaon. What is the thinking behind this except for the fact that the babus and netas doing this want to keep it under their control? Please think beyond Delhi to the rest of the nation.
on May 4, 2011Observer: While I agree with you to some extent that Delhi/NCR is pampered but if you look deep at the level of 'innovation' that Bhan and his team have managed in setting up THSTI and a bunch of other bodies, you'd understand that it required very close supervision from DBT. Eg. The Planning Commission recently approved a biotech council, BIRAC which is expected to get Cabinet approval by June end. It's a panel that will have globally available talent to provide expert advice to the cluster, a problem solver body if you will. As for biotech expertise, I think (I've been in Bangalore for over a decade) the breadth of research talent that NCR offers -- with NII, ICGEB, AIIMS, NRCPB, IIT-D, etc -- outweighs that of Bangalorean's which sure has 182 biotech companies, but they are mostly services and small products driven.
on May 5, 2011Close supervision in this age of internet, videoconferencing and so on does not mean being geographically constrained. The central government needs to think beyond the Japanese model of focussing everything in one city (Tokyo - in case of Japan. NCR in case of India) and be more like the US where multiple cities have unique areas of expertise which have grown organically over time and which has been nurtured. Eg: Silicon Valley, energy industries in Texas, commodity exchange in Chicago and so on. India is too vast to focus and pamper one city alone. Bangalore has ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO COMPANIES ALREADY! Instead of nurturing this and scaling it up, the government wants to setup a greenfield biotech cluster in Faridabad - a town known for old economy industries more than biotech. This initiative will lose steam simply because its trying to force-fit an high tech field in an area not known for it instead of setting it up in places where the field has grown organically over time. Why is the government not making efforts to setup institutes in Bangalore or Hyderabad?
on May 5, 2011