The Hindu Business Line : `Science + Patents + Capital = Biotechnology'

STORY so far: There is the din of BPO backlash in the background and I attend a NASSCOM meet where the speakers comfort the audience in so many words that `we shall overcome'. I realise there is pragmatism in what the Infosys chief suggests — adopt a productive dialogue with the US rather than getting shrill.

Episode 64

Some days are too routine, especially when you have a month like February in a leap year with no holidays. The only relief, however, was that Saturday bash I attended on the much-despised Valentine's Day, what with the culture police trying to play spoilsport. At times, it appears that grownups give ultra importance to things like love and such, and therefore start worrying too much and turn protectionists, while the current generation takes everything in its stride and goes about life.

If I were a marketer, these are the occasions I would not miss because of the business potential, however much activists cry hoarse that there is brash commercialisation of fine sentiments and so forth.

What's wrong if a movie-house were to increase its sales by giving two tickets for the price of one on one special day? Or, if a restaurant were to offer meals on a unique heart-shaped plate to be shared by a pair? When, after the blinds are drawn, and shutters downed, the cashier tallies up his collections, results would only be too obvious.

People generally need occasions to celebrate; however, for cash-flow, it hardly matters who or what caused the sale. What is significant is that the engine of enterprise keeps running.

*********

"Swati," called the boss over the intercom. "Get me some info on the latest on the bioinformatics scene." I said, yes, and got down to business. The most recent to catch my eye was the setting up of a new centre in Hyderabad, where our company had some interests.

A $12-billion technology major was tying up with a DNA fingerprinting company to initiate a medical bioinformatics centre, and the media had billed it as the first such facility in the country. It would focus on drug discovery, gene therapy-related research using a network of computers in a grid system.

The more I searched for info, the more I was getting drawn into a different world where debits and credits did not exist, nor tax and law. There were new terms such as nanobiology that Microsoft Word was marking red, as if the software existed in a different era.

It was only a few years ago when biotechnology (BT) was seen as a poor cousin of IT. But now information technology is wooing BT and is willing to rechristen itself as bioinformatics.

For starters, bioinformatics is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge to form a single discipline. If only the three Institutes, viz. ICAI, ICSI and ICWAI, could merge with such ease, I mused.

Even as we are busy with GDP growth and election drama, scientists are silently mapping the human genes, which perhaps would include some tricky ones responsible for politics and terrorism. No easy exercise, because the result is a long chain of numbers for nucleotide and amino acid sequences and the "genomic revolution" is going on in full swing. Bioinformatics is relevant for creating and maintaining databases to store biological information.

*********

When I met the boss that afternoon, I had a folder with the info he wanted, plus a recent book I had picked off the `new arrivals' in Fountainhead: The Biotech Investor by Tom Abate. Its subtitle read, "How to profit from the coming boom in biotechnology."

The boss smiled, and said, "Good, you are able to read my mind." Since I had thumbed through the book during lunch, I could tell him that it had inputs on how to anticipate drug trial announcements, assess the potential market, manage patent work, identify the `coattail' industries and essentially separate the bio-engineered grain from the chaff.

I moved over to the whiteboard he had in his room and wrote, "Science + Patents + Capital = Biotechnology." He said, "As I go through the info you have collected, you make a visit to the show that is on in Anna University on the subject."

*********

They had set up a mini-museum with models that explained everything in this new field for lay people like me. A Prof explained the landmark decision in the US, involving Ananda Chakrabarty, the scientist who had altered a bacterium so that it would digest oil, something useful in combating oil spills.

Elsewhere, there was the age map of the world and I shuddered to look at how we all would be growing old and how the old would outnumber the young. And so we need badly a science that would help us stay young! Another scientist patiently differentiated the traditional and the new approaches to disease curing. Vaccines prevent diseases, I used to think, till I heard that the newer ones don a teacher role to instruct the body's immune system how to fight tumours.

Don't we need something like that in accounting standards too, I thought? Perhaps the ICAI could, instead of doing a gate-keeping work, interact with software manufacturers to create an accounting software to fight wrong accounting practices.

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One of the visitors was a leading venture capitalist, Mr Paisa Wallah. I asked him, what he considered as the safest and the most sensible time to take a position in a company.

He looked at me and said, "I'd go in only after approval, that is, when the scientific and regulatory risks have been eliminated. Then, I can look at the metrics such as the size of the market, nature of competition, company's ability to make and sell the product and so forth."

I queried: "In patents and scientific variables, what would be relevant to you as an investor?" He shot back, "Simple. First, see the key patents listed by number, evaluate their strengths, and check if there is any litigation ongoing because there would be contingent liability, you see.

As for scientific parameters, I'd get my staff look at the list of important publications by the company's staff, key conferences and papers they presented, and also find out who the advisory members are." I was already having a checklist to go back and work on in the office.

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After about an hour, when I was about to leave, I ran into the venture capitalist at the coffee vending machine. "Any other words of wisdom?" I asked him, smiling.

And he said, "Me and my chums have simple goals: harvest profits, distrust analysts, be a contrarian, and pick companies with deep pipelines." I remembered having seen that in Tom's book, though I wondered what he meant by pipelines.

It was only when I was driving back that I realised that it was important for a company to keep a lot of things happening, and to work on many ideas at the same time, and have products to fall one after the other from the pipeline.

(To be continued)

Swati_CA@hotmail.com

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