The Hindu Business Line : Ticel Bio Park to expand; looking for partner

TICEL Bio Park Ltd, the R&D infrastructure facility for biotechnology companies promoted by the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, is expanding its facility. It is also scouting for a private sector partner, according to sources in the know.

Ticel will quadruple its built-up space to about six lakh sq ft from 1.5 lakh sq ft, which has been fully booked by biotechnology companies.

The second phase is to come up on land close to the existing facility at Taramani on Old Mahabalipuram road.

It is also putting up a Rs 10-crore Bio Resource Centre that will provide common equipment facilities for the companies that take up space there. The process of identifying a private sector partner to establish the bio resource centre is on. The centre is being set up as per the State's biotechnology policy.

Ticel has companies with interests in research and development in pharma and healthcare and the expansion will provide for a mix of companies with interests in agriculture, food, health, bioinformatics, genomics and marine biotechnology. An intellectual property right cell will also be set up.

According to the sources, leading biotechnology companies have booked space at Ticel. They include Innergene of the US for a bioinformatics facility, Virosys Pharmaceuticals Inc, US for research on therapeutic antibodies for HIV and cancer, Sanmar Speciality Chemicals for biological research, and Cetex Petrochemicals Ltd for diversifying into pharma and vaccine.

Ticel Bio Park is likely to take a stake in Innergene, which is putting up its facility at a cost of Rs 12 crore.

The park's board has also approved the outright sale of one module to a US-based company, Gene Lab Technologies, for medical diagnostics and stem cell research, the sources said.

SGS India Ltd, a quality certification company, was among the earliest to take up an entire floor at Ticel.

The Bio Resource Centre will have wet labs for fermentation, microbiology, molecular biology, plant and animal tissue culture and downstream processing and analysis.

Ticel Bio Park was put up in technical collaboration with Cornell University of the US. The agreement with Cornell University, which ended in 2003, will be renewed. The facility has 1,42,799 sq ft of super built-up area and 81,976 sq ft of laboratory area.

Through a recent order, the Government has made it more attractive for its tenants by bringing down electricity tariffs. The operation and maintenance costs have been revised in line with industry needs, the sources said.

The State Government has recognised the bio park as an R&D infrastructure facility and therefore it is eligible for power tariffs on that scale. This means power costs come down by about 40 per cent compared to the commercial rates it was earlier slapped with. Power tariffs account for about two-thirds of the running cost of such facilities and this marks a significant relief, the sources said.

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