Even as the biotechnology
industry is facing different kinds of regulatory obstacles,
there seems to be a ray of hope for the country to become
an outsourcing destination in drug discovery processes.
There has been a good demand, especially for the bioinformatics
sector which has a role in all aspects of the drug discovery
value chain.
In terms of global market size, the bioinformatics software
is estimated to be between $300-500 million and an average
R&D spend by the pharma biotech companies would be
about $50 billion in the years to come. "By developing
expertise in bioinformatics, India can be a global outsourcing
destination for drug discovery," says Dr M Vidyasagar,
executive vice president of Tata Consultancy Services
(TCS), Hyderabad.
The skill set of India is fast catching up and there is
a greater willingness to outsource to India, he feels.
"Unlike IT, bioinformatics is more vertical and requires
a longer training, and the study is more about biology
and less on informatics", he says. The IT outsourcing
model would not work in drug discovery and there was very
little incentives for developing an outsourcing model,
he said. Hence, it is necessary to have a risk and reward
sharing costing models, and regulations need to be driven
by marketplace realities and not ideologies. The areas
of interest for outsourcing are discovery, pre clinical
studies, clinical trials and post approval activities.
The role of bioinformatics in the discovery process includes
target identification, target validation, lead identification
and optimisation.
"Indian industry is waiting for the hurdles in intellectual
property related and patent issues (IPR) to be cleared
to capture a major share of the international market through
the outsourcing model", he said.
Outsourcing for genomics, protemoics, apart from various
rational drug-designing models are the big 'catch areas',
which Indian companies see as sunrise areas to cash in
on through projects from global companies, which are looking
at outsourcing from Indian companies.
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