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India takes on new outsourcing 'pill'

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CIOL Bureau
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HYDERABAD: Software outsourcing has hogged headlines for many years now, but a little away from the attention and buzz is the drug discovery outsourcing. Driving this point up on his sleeve is the TCS executive VP, Dr M Vidyasagar, who has been making constant effort to project India as the destination for drug discovery outsourcing. It's quite possible, asserts Vidyasagar, in a formal chat with Sunitha Natti of CyberMedia News, on the first ever product for the life sciences-BioSuite.






Could you share with us the focus of the life sciences division of TCS?




In the life sciences division there are two types of applications. One being agricultural biotechnology and the other being pharmaceutical industry. We are definitely not into agri bio. That's a specialized segment involving numerous genetic modifications. We are concentrating on pharmaceutical markets, which have more than 90 percent of workflow.





BioSuite is the first product for the life sciences sector. What has been the progress so far in terms of both product development and market acceptance?





Formally, the product was launched in UK and on September 30, we got the final acceptance test being done. Now we have concurred an agreement with CSIR about pricing. The idea is to make it affordable to Indian Institutes and we are presently working out a market strategy for this.



BioSuite has two purposes. Primarily, it establishes credibility and on top of that, we also want to facilitate the Indian academic institutions. When you talk about market acceptance, you should look at bioinformatics division as a whole, rather than looking at BioSuite independently. Preliminary results are good, having been tested by 18 Indian institutions and now its also being tested by foreign institutions and soon we would be launching it into the market.





How is BioSuite being marketed? How big is the market for the same?





We are charting out an effective marketing strategy, which would be in place soon. People in our Mumbai office are working on it now and once in place, it would surely add value to its existence.



The pharmaceutical market is between $300 billion - $400 billion and R&D component is about $45 billion - $50 billion. Biotech pharma, is anywhere between $25 billion - $30 billion and is growing very fast at 25 - 30 percent. Biotech R&D is about $15 billion - $18 billion. This includes drug development, then we have animal study, which we are not into and then we have the human clinical trials. Not actual trials but software collecting and analyzing the data.


If we look at the drug discovery element, it's about 15 percent to 18 percent of the total figure. But also includes some amount of opportunity costs and this further brings down the figure to $ three percent to $ five billion. We should project India as the destination for drug discovery outsourcing. Bioinformatics by itself is just like a means to an end.





What are the company's expansion plans as far as products are concerned?










India would be hub for drug discovery outsourcing. After BioSuite the next thing would be to integrate the database, storage and retrieval with BioSuite. We are also going to come up with a BioCluster, which is also funded by CSIR. An amount of Rs 219 lakh has been conferred for this.





How do you see the competition for the product?



Bioinformatics is not a standalone activity. Ours is a modern package written with all the best software packages but our competitors have an integrated solution like this. Competition also comes from open source software but our product is conceptualized in such a way that it easily coordinates with that too, thereby overcoming the barrier.





IT has been the focus of TCS and life sciences is a new sector. How do you see this division contributing to the TCS' overall strategy and growth?



Life sciences is an equally important sector. Pharmaceutical sector is roughly about half of the IT sector. IT sector is around $ 880 billion, while pharma is about $ 400 billion approximately. It can't be ignored. We have no clear idea as to how much it would be contributing over a period of time. But we can surely feel that it would make place for itself. TCS is growing at a rate of 40 percent per annum. To make an impact on a company like TCS, the product also has to be very significant.

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