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Since 25 per cent of the pharma companies' spend goes into manufacturing, the information could be mined to look for opportunity for innovation.

BANGALORE, Jan. 27

CAN students from the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) become entrepreneurs? Can companies be started here?

"An absolute yes," said Prof Charles Cooney, Professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has been associated with IBAB since its inception. The only thing is that Indian students are a little "risk averse", he commented.

Delivering a talk to mark the first anniversary of the institute he said that process manufacturing even of bulk drugs held promise as a career. "In the biotech manufacturing process, two products are formed - the product itself and the information generated."

Since 25 per cent of the pharma companies' spend goes into manufacturing, the information could be mined to look for opportunity for innovation. Process informatics, as this area is called, could help make products faster, cheaper and improve profitability for companies. It would also improve coordination between R&D and manufacturing, he said.

Given India's IT expertise, computer simulation of the manufacturing process could be used to bring down the manufacturing time and reduce cost of goods sold (COGS). The COGS could come down by as much as 30 per cent and time to market could come down by four months, Prof Cooney said. In an industry, where the period in which products make money for the company is very short, the tiniest improvement in time to market could make a vast difference to its revenues, he said. Dynamic computer modelling could be used to explore solutions to manufacturing problems.

The first batch, which is doing its internship with companies have yet to be placed, while the current 35 students are obviously on the look out of for prospective employers.

The institute has close links with the industry, and a number of people from the industry are invited to deliver lectures to the students, said its Director, Dr Manju Bansal. The biotech industry in Bangalore is still in an early stage of development, unlike Mumbai, where the pharma industry flourishes. CEOs and other top executives from Aurigene, Lupin Labs, Millipore, Sartorius, Strand Genomics and Cytogenomics were present at the function, though most of them are yet to hire from the institute.

The companies said that they were looking forward to having the students as recruits. Some like Sartorius, the fermentation and chromatography company, were looking specifically at engineers with an additional degrees in biotechnology. (This was a condition that the first batch could not satisfy, the current batch includes engineering students, Dr Bansal said).

Strand Genomics, one of the few companies to be actually working on bioinformatics, was looking for information technologists, as the company had domain knowledge, said CEO, Dr Vijay Chandru.

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