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India's Biotech MessiahIn the dusty industrial area of Udyog Vihar in Gurgaon, thecompact chrome-and-glass building that houses the two-year-oldTranslational Health Science Technology Institute (THSTI) is thescene of quiet action.
At the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Research Centre on thesecond floor, scientists and doctors are giving the final touches toIndia’s first community clinical trial (which is conducted directlythrough doctors and clinics) for a childhood vaccine for rotavirusinfection, developed in collaboration with Hyderabad-based BharatBiotech. The infection, which causes diarrhoea, kills at least100,000 children every year. Some 8,000 children will be part ofthis late stage trial in Pune, Delhi, and Vellore.
Learning from this will expedite THSTI’s next product, atuberculosis vaccine, says dean Sudhanshu Vrati.
On the floor right above, at the Paediatric Biology Centre, its headShinjini Bhatnagar is busy kicking off several public healthresearch projects. Her department is trying to figure out why oralvaccines have poor intake in developing world children. Or, what isthe extent of celiac diseases in children in India? The diseaseresults in wheat allergies, and causes stunted growth with severalother complications. So, at the Centre for Bio-Design, a stone’s throw awayfrom THSTI, Bhatnagar along with Navin Khanna from the InternationalCentre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and a local company, isdeveloping an inexpensive point-of-care diagnostic kit for celiac disease. Thiswill be supplied to all peripheral hospitals.
These are the initial outcomes of a massive collaborative effort amongresearch institutions, hospitals and companies that the Department ofBiotechnology (DBT) is driving in the National Capital Region. Biotech hubsexist in the country, such as in Bangalore and Hyderabad, but the noveltyhere is that it’s being built ground-up to encourage practising doctors to workwith basic researchers, something which even the US bio-clusters have foundhard to manage.
The THSTI is at the heart of this bio-cluster, the brainchild of DBT secretaryMaharaj Kishan Bhan. The aim is to drive innovation and create an
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environment that will take lab research to the market faster.
Half a dozen niche centres have already been set up around THSTI and atleast 10 more will come up in the next five years. These centres will also havesome degree of autonomy to devise their own programmes. Today they allstand within a 500-metre radius in Gurgaon; in about 18 months the wholeset-up will be moved a new 200-acre campus in Faridabad. Besides these, allpremier research institutions and universities in the NCR, including AIIMSand Gurgaon district hospital, are signing agreements to share knowledge andexpertise.
The THSTI is modelled on the Health-Science-Technology (HST) programmebetween MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It brings together allresearch institutions, teaching hospitals and universities in the Boston area tocollaborate in solving human health problems. Engineers and scientists taketheir expertise from the lab to the bedside and bring back learning from thebedside to their benches.
A handful of institutes in Delhi collaborated in life sciences research evenbefore THSTI was set up in 2009, but what makes the cluster different fromthose “good neighbourhoods”, says Bhan, is that it has common governance todrive functional connectivity between academics, innovation andcommercialisation. “A cluster must be larger than the entities, their outputshould be multiplicative, not just additive,” he says.
Bhan took inspiration from the Banaras Hindu University–the first of its kindin India, set up by Madan Mohan Malviya in 1916. It was part of Malviya’svision to link up modern developments in science and technology where heoften invited persons of outstanding ability from all over the world.
But in the 21st century, Bhan says, India needs “enormous capacity foradvance innovation.” Over the next five years DBT plans to spend Rs. 800crore to Rs. 1,000 crore on it.
What’s at Stake?
The estimated $180 billion global biotech industry can easily trace many of itsstar performers’ technology to university research. Biotechnology has thrivedin regions where clusters have either evolved naturally as in Cambridge,Massachusetts, and San Francisco- San Diego in California, or have beenlargely policy-driven as in Biopolis, Singapore and Cambridge, UK.
By that measure, the $3 billion Indian biotech is a greenhorn. Largely drivenby services and contract research, the Indian biotech industry, on its own, isill-equipped to address India’s health and agri-biotech demands. Besides,large biotech firms are merging with pharma companies as the latteraggressively cuts back on R&D spend. That’s why DBT has embarked on whatBhan calls “a massive experimentation”. He wants to prepare a whole newgeneration to help develop new drugs, diagnostics and agricultural productsfor India by 2020.
The 63-year-old Bhan, a paediatrics specialist-turned-bureaucrat, whobecame DBT secretary in 2004, may not have known all about innovationwhen he started as a doctor at AIIMS. But, he says, he began learning as hedrove public health programmes from the hospital, which also involvedworking with an NGO.
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His life, he says, extended beyond a physician’s role. Public health was and isclose to his heart. He even spent some time in Madurai interviewing 200 ruralwomen when the UNICEF chief asked him to figure out what women feltabout food. As chairman of the WHO Task Force on child health research, hewas also part of the team that developed the low osmolarity oral rehydrationsolution which is now used worldwide in the diarrhoeal control programme.
All that sowed the seeds of DBT’s national biotech policy of 2007 which hasbio-cluster as a goal.
Field experience, he says, helped him network globally. That’s coming inhandy in bringing partners for the bio-cluster. The Bill and Melinda GatesFoundation is a partner with DBT. Bhan has created International Chairs toattract renowned scientists for setting up labs in the cluster and already hastwo jewels: Neuroscientist Mriganka Sur of MIT and immunologist RafiAhmed, 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 ofChicago who studies global political economy of biomedicine with acomparative 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 asystem of incentives to retain creative people. How do you get an academicpost-doctoral researcher (who needs to own’ a problem and show hiscontribution in solving it for a viable career) to work on a collaborativeproject, 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 youneed an industry specialist. For example, today if one has to screen a drug forcancer, a sample would have to be sent to the National Institutes of Health inthe US. So, the DBT is investing Rs. 150 crore in a Technology Platform centrethat will develop critical tools for life sciences.
For that, Bhan is hiring experts on contract; “That would give theseprofessionals a life of their own.” For example, S. Ramaswamy, CEO of theCentre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, a not-for-profit company inBangalore, is also a professor and dean of a DBT stem cell institute. Broughtin on a three-year contract, Ramaswamy is helping the Faridabad cluster setup a similar centre.
This is transforming the human resource policy in the government, thoughBhan admits it’s a “nightmare” to seek such transformation. Within twomonths 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 nowconvince many more people to consider a sabbatical or a collaborativeprogramme in India, says Martha Gray of MIT, who heads the HSTprogramme between MIT and Harvard.
Mentorship could pose another hurdle. Unlike other clusters, this one doesn’t
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have a large university supplying skilled workforce (Boston has Harvard-MIT;California has Berkeley and Stanford). For now, the cluster will pool in peoplefrom Delhi institutions like AIIMS and the National Institute of Immunology.Meanwhile, the Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), a UNESCO-DBTinstitute, is being developed so that over time, it will help fill this gap. RCBruns a PhD programme, so by the time the centres are ready, one full batch ofPhD will be ready. A Bill seeking to make RCB a university was sent to theUnion Cabinet in March. University status will give RCB flexibility to designcourses that suit the market requirement.
To that end, says Shrikumar Surayanarayan, who recently quit as chiefexecutive of the cluster after getting the project off the ground, the cluster isalso designed to foster integrated manpower development where people canmove between disciplines–academic to experimental to clinical to industry,without losing their affiliation.
Creating a Marketplace
Ideas yield products only if there’s a marketplace for them. But marketplacesneed to be created, with a functional network of researchers, managers andinvestors.
Though no comparative studies have been done to see how the policydrivenclusters in Singapore and the UK have fared, most clusters owe part of theirsuccess to one or more anchor biotech companies. Professor Steven Casper atKeck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, California,who has studied bio-clusters around the world, says at least 22 companieswere formed by Genentech managers alone, which contributed to SanFrancisco’s success as a cluster.
In India, is the industry interested? Certainly. Does it have research depth?Not exactly.
THSTI dean Vrati recalls how his group transferred a vaccine candidate forJapanese Encephalitis to Panacea Biotec more than five years ago but thathasn’t reached the market yet. The scientists’ work wasn’t industry grade, butthe company’s technology wasn’t scalable either. “We are much wiser now. AtTHSTI we are equipped to do end-to- end vaccine research and development;we can now give a much-finished product to the industry,” he says.
At the same time, two DBT funding programmes–Small Business InnovationResearch Initiative and Biotechnology Industry Partnership Programme–areworking to create a culture of R&D in the industry. More than 800 proposalsfor product innovation have come from the industry and DBT has fundedabout 120 of them in 18 months. In 2011, the department allocated Rs. 180crore; it’ll go up to Rs. 300 crore by 2012. “When a company like Reliance,which can fund this whole scheme, comes looking for a Rs. 1 crore grant, youbegin to realise companies, irrespective of their size, want to be associatedwith you,” says a DBT adviser. Biocon’s oral insulin research was also fundedby DBT. “We not only give money but also technical expertise,” says Bhan, “IfBiocon had consulted us on the clinical trial design, the recent failure inmeeting primary targets [lowering HbA1c level, a type of blood glucose level]could have been avoided.”
Bhan’s enthusiasm is infectious. But what happens when his tenure is over?“You have to understand we are building an ecosystem for innovation in this
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country. This is a 30-year project,” he says. “Before I go I’ll leave a roadmap.In fact, a document for the second phase, with all rules, guidelines and built-in legality, will soon be up for national consultation.”
Mriganka Sur
Mriganka Sur More than 35 years after Mriganka Sur left India as an IITgraduate, the neuroscientist who heads the department of brain and cognitivescience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now making time forthe country.
As a visiting professor at the National Brain Research Centre, Sur will helpkick off two research clusters: One will use high-resolution imagingtechnology to study cells and synapses in the living, intact brain; the secondwill make stem cells from adult skin cells to study neuropsychiatry disorderslike autism and schizophrenia.
One of Sur’s recent researches on Rett Syndrome, a small subset of autism,has entered clinical trial at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. He says thathe’d “love to do some of this [clinical studies] in India” if support comes by.“Of all the things I could do with my life at this stage,” he says, referring toseveral old and new initiatives at MIT, “I choose to do this [associate withNBRC] because I think it’s high time I did science with Indians, in India.”
This article appears in the May 6 issue of Forbes India, a ForbesMedia licensee.
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