Maharaj Kishan Bhan Aims For a New Bio Culture
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Image: Amit Verma
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EAR TO GROUND THSTI's aim is to enable lab research to reach the market faster
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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.
The 63-year-old Bhan, a paediatrics specialist-turned-bureaucrat, who became DBT secretary in 2004, may not have known all about innovation when he started as a doctor at AIIMS. But, he says, he began learning as he drove public health programmes from the hospital, which also involved working with an NGO.
His life, he says, extended beyond a physician’s role. Public health was and is close to his heart. He even spent some time in Madurai interviewing 200 rural women when the UNICEF chief asked him to figure out what women felt about food. As chairman of the WHO Task Force on child health research, he was also part of the team that developed the low osmolarity oral rehydration solution which is now used worldwide in the diarrhoeal
control programme.
All that sowed the seeds of DBT’s national biotech policy of 2007 which has bio-cluster as a goal.
Field experience, he says, helped him network globally. That’s coming in handy in bringing partners for the bio-cluster. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a partner with DBT. Bhan has created International Chairs to attract renowned scientists for setting up labs in the cluster and already has two jewels: Neuroscientist Mriganka Sur of MIT and immunologist Rafi Ahmed, director of Emory Vaccine Centre at Emory University.
It’s a good beginning, but there are challenges ahead.
“This is a complicated initiative. If it works, it could be transformational,” says Kaushik Sunder Rajan, a life science anthropologist at the University of Chicago who studies global political economy of biomedicine with a comparative focus on the US and India.
Getting in the Right People
Even though Bhan has managed to bring in great talent, he needs to create a system of incentives to retain creative people. How do you get an academic post-doctoral researcher (who needs to ‘own’ a problem and show his contribution in solving it for a viable career) to work on a collaborative project, asks Sunder Rajan.
Bhan is aware of the problem. “We [Indian scientists] are extreme turf people; we are loners,” he says.
Moreover, traditional academicians may not be a good fit; sometimes you need an industry specialist. For example, today if one has to screen a drug for cancer, a sample would have to be sent to the National Institutes of Health in the US. So, the DBT is investing Rs. 150 crore in a Technology Platform centre that will develop critical tools for life sciences.
For that, Bhan is hiring experts on contract; “That would give these professionals a life of their own.” For example, S. Ramaswamy, CEO of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, a not-for-profit company in Bangalore, is also a professor and dean of a DBT stem cell institute. Brought in on a three-year contract, Ramaswamy is helping the Faridabad cluster set up a similar centre.
This is transforming the human resource policy in the government, though Bhan admits it’s a “nightmare” to seek such transformation. Within two months of Sur’s joining the National Brain Research Centre in Manesar, Haryana (which has an MoU with the cluster), he was sanctioned a grant of $2 million. This, along with the physical infrastructure in place, will now convince many more people to consider a sabbatical or a collaborative programme in India, says Martha Gray of MIT, who heads the HST programme between MIT and Harvard.
Mentorship could pose another hurdle. Unlike other clusters, this one doesn’t have a large university supplying skilled workforce (Boston has Harvard-MIT; California has Berkeley and Stanford). For now, the cluster will pool in people from Delhi institutions like AIIMS and the National Institute of Immunology. Meanwhile, the Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), a UNESCO-DBT institute, is being developed so that over time, it will help fill this gap. RCB runs a PhD programme, so by the time the centres are ready, one full batch of PhD will be ready. A Bill seeking to make RCB a university was sent to the Union Cabinet in March. University status will give RCB flexibility to design courses that suit the market requirement.
To that end, says Shrikumar Surayanarayan, who recently quit as chief executive of the cluster after getting the project off the ground, the cluster is also designed to foster integrated manpower development where people can move between disciplines — academic to experimental to clinical to industry, without losing their affiliation.
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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.
