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IBM
Life Sciences keen on establishing presence in India
EPP
News Bureau - New Delhi
In
a meeting with the president of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation
(BIO) Carl Feldbaum, the CII biotechnology mission led by Kiran
Mazumdar Shaw discussed potential areas of collaboration in Toronto,
Canada. To provide greater international visibility to the Indian
biotech sector, the BIO president invited articles from Indian authors
and companies to be published in the Biocentury magazine. He also
invited greater Indian participation at BIO 2003, the annual convention
and exhibition of BIO, which attracted 14000 representatives from
44 countries in 2001.
The
evolution of BIO, with that of the biotechnology sector in North
America, provided a key learning opportunity to the nascent Indian
biotech companies. Since the setting up of BIO in 1993, the number
of approved biotechnology drug and vaccine products in the United
States has grown six-fold to 117 as of December 31, 2000. Annual
investments on the other hand have increased from $3 billion in
1993 to an estimated $11 billion in 2001 and biotech products on
the market in the US went up from 22 in 1993 to 117 in 2000.
BIO
has also been instrumental in ensuring that a variety of tax incentives
were enacted at the state and federal level to encourage biotech
investment in the US. The meeting of the CII mission with Mr. Victor
Doerkson, Minister for Science & Technology of the Alberta Province
in Canada also threw up the scope for discussing collaborations
and alliances between Alberta and India in the areas of clinical
trials, bioinformatics, bioprocessing and nanotechnology. Alberta
would also be part of the Canadian mission to India in February
2003.
In
a meeting with the CII mission members, IBM Life Sciences expressed
keen interest about its intent to establish a major presence in
the Indian market. MDS Sciex, which has a tie-up with the Bangalore
based Kshema Technologies, is another biotech firm keen on expanding
its presence in India and would be participating in CII’s Biotech
India 2003.
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