Biotech major Avesthagen will restructure its entire operations to focus only on two verticals, health and agri-business while certain of its manufacturing plants will be sold off to reduce its debt.

“We have decided to merge bionutrition, bioagri, biopharma and seeds businesses to form two entities - Avesthagen and Ava Seeds,” Ms Villoo Morawala Patell, chairperson and managing director of Avesthagen told Business Line.

Avesthagen will be a pure healthcare company working on preventive and personalised healthcare while Ava Seeds would work on all agricultural related issues especially environmentally adjusted crops, she added.

The company is also in the process to raise $80 million through PE route to fund research as well as commercialise healthcare portfolio.

Under the preventive healthcare, the company is planning to introduce India specific whole genome scan diagnostics which can scan for 28 diseases. Onco screen scanning for five types of cancer in one chip, and explore global opportunity through metabolomics (scientific study of a chemical composition) based signature for early detection of breast cancer.

In the personalised healthcare, six bio-actives and eight bio-similar developed by the company are in various stages of commercialisation. The bio-actives are two each related to diabetes, bone health and cardio-vascular. Under bio-similar company’s products - Avdesp (erythropoietin), Avent (arthritics), Aveben and Avetux (both related to cancer) are to hit the market in two years. Also the company has few medicines under OTC and functional foods under Avesta Good Earth.

Debt

The company in order to focus only on health and agri-business verticals is also planning to sell few of its manufacturing units and other assets located in Bangalore and Hyderabad to clear part of the debt.

The company has Rs 100 crore debt incurred in the last two financial years due to uncertain global markets.

The current revenues of the company is around Rs 40 crore mainly through intellectual property (IP) licensing and job related services in healthcare and agriculture sectors.

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