With increasing demand in the global market place, India is becoming a preferred destination for biotechnology products.

A strong base for pharmaceutical research and development and IT services are driving the offshoring of bioinformatics services. Bioinformatics can be defined as the application of information science to biology. The need for bioinformatics arises in every stage of the drug discovery and development process.

The industry is dependent on buyers from the drug development, conduct research, clinical trials and contract manufacturing segments. Government initiatives, through the establishment of public sector infrastructure and research labs, are supporting the industry.

A recent study conducted by ValueNotes, providers of research and intelligence services and products, has stated that the vendors offer integrated bioinformatics solutions such as biological and chemical databases, data analysis, data mining, bio-medical text mining and customised tool development among others.

According to the study, increasing cost and timelines for developing a new drug and lower R&D productivity have compelled global research companies to cut costs and time. Further, a large database is being generated as many genomes (besides the human genome) are being sequenced. Handling, storage, retrieval and analysis of these data in new drug discovery and development have necessitated the emergence of sophisticated bioinformatics tools and services. Given this backdrop, it is expected that the global bioinformatics market would grow at a rate of 16 per cent over 2007-10.

The bioinformatics services' vendor space has been split into five separate categories, namely, pure play, domestic IT, domestic life science and multinational IT and multinational pure play. Under the domestic IT category, there are 11 prominent players such as Tata Consultancy Services, Satyam Computor Services, Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies, HCL Technologies, Mascon Global, Persistent Systems, Siri Technologies, Tata Elxsi, Thinkgen and Caliber Technologies.

These players focus on providing bioinformatics and other services for discovery, clinical trial and also to cater to IT needs of healthcare/hospitals. They have increased the focus in bioinformatics recently.

Future scenario

The study feels that the focus of bioinformatics in the drug discovery process has shifted from target identification to target validation. The market for laboratory information management system products in India is estimated at $23 million in 2007. This is expected to grow to above 30 per cent over 2007-10. It is also expected that companies with presence across various geographies require bioinformatics services on a global scale and often seek a single vendor who can offer a comprehensive range of services on a long-term basis, across the world.

The industry is expected to scale up its business through organic and inorganic growth.

As far as funding for expansion is concerned, rising demand for bioinformatics has improved venture capitalist interest and presence in this sector.

The bioinformatics outsourcing opportunity will rise from $32 million in 2007 to $62 million in 2010. These opportunities range from laboratory information management systems' enterprise solutions, improved database utility and data management tools to exportable software that can be shared.

However, to capture this opportunity, vendors need to establish creditability through success of past projects, and by demonstrating a strong technical capability, establishing strong overseas relationships and training end-users.

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, January 14, 2008