BANGALORE: Over 100 clinical trials of new drugs being conducted worldwide at any given time, by the world's largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, use a purpose-built information and trials tool developed in India. The software suite - "Clinicopia" - is the flagship product of InfoPro Solutions, a Westlake Village, California-based company founded by medical systems analyst, Vikram Marla, in 1995. Core development of the product was done by InfoPro's team of engineers at the company's Bangalore-based centre.

It is claimed to be the world's first suite developed with multiple tools for the end-to-end supply chain required to conduct clinical trials that follow drug discoveries. The Clinicopia suite at present encompasses tools for supply chain management.

Over the next 12 to 15 months, the Bangalore team will develop additional modules for the suite which will address process execution - monitoring the actual `recipe' of the evolving drug and helping the distant trial sites to keep records of every drug dose administered.

InfoPro's India-based Country Manager, Shiva Kumar, added that the product would prove particularly useful for Indian pharma companies aiming for a global presence with their newly-discovered drugs and need FDA approval before they could address the huge American market.

Courtesy: The Hindu, August 31, 2003

Over the last month, as the new American academic year began, some 600,000 students from all over the world, including about 70,000 from India, winged their way to the USA for higher studies.

More than 70 per cent of Indian students come to the US to study engineering and science. In the past, a majority opted to stay back in America. According to recent studies, around 40 per cent of engineering, mathematics, and computer science graduates are international students, a majority from India and China.

To get a sense of this, Stanford University Computer Sciences School had 170 Ph.D students listed, nearly half are foreigners, including 28 Indians. It's the same story in other well-known schools such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue.

For all the hand-wringing going on, the US simply does not produce enough home-grown science and engineering graduates. The crisis begins at the high school level itself, where Americans have over the years zoned out of math and science (according to a study, 40 per cent of math classes in public schools are taught by unqualified teachers; they are now importing math teachers from India).

The National Science Foundation estimated in 2000 that 12 per cent of US science and engineering degree holders were of Indian origin and 9 per cent were Chinese, although together they constitute only around 2 per cent of the US population. Universities too bank on foreign students both for the quality and the money they bring. Indian students are particularly coveted. Deans and faculty members of several schools have told this columnist that they are simply the best.

Some of the desi success owes to the rich Indian tradition in engineering studies going beyond the IITs. India's oldest engineering school, the IIT (formerly REC) in Rourkee (established 1848) is as hoary as the Renssellaer Polytechnic, America's oldest, which was founded in 1825 during the Ulysses Grant presidency. The Guindy Engineering College in Chennai derives from an industrial school attached to a gun carriage factory of 1842 vintage. Many engineering schools in India date back a century. India's founding fathers began working on the IIT idea as far back as the 1920s, long before Independence, although they were set up only in the 1950s.

The Indian Human Resources Ministry put the number of engineering schools in India at 1,200, cranking out 360,000 engineers annually. Some of the brightest come here, study, teach, work for topnotch companies, found new ones, and burnish the Indian ran reputation. Every indication is they will continue to come here in large numbers. If the US puts the squeeze on them, they will return to India and do equally well. It's a win-win situation.

Courtesy: The Times of India, August 31, 2003

Bangalore: The Satellite Aided Search & Rescue transponder on board the Insat-3A satellite, helped save the lives of 28 persons on August 11 by detecting the distress signals from a Chinese cargo vessel, according to a release issued by the Indian Space Research Organisation on Friday.

Insat-3A received the distress signals from the cargo vessel M.V. Yujiya, which was sinking in the Bay of Bengal. Soon after the distress signals were detected, the rescue authorities of the Indian Coast Guard were alerted by Isro's Indian Mission Control (INMCC) Centre at Bangalore, which is part of the international COSPAS-SARSAT Satellite Aided Search & Rescue Programme. All the 28 persons on board the vessel were rescued, it said.Insat-3A carries a Search & Rescue transponder which keeps a constant vigil over the Indian Ocean region.

Courtesy: The Asian Age, August 30, 2003

Seven asteroids have been named for each of the astronauts, including Indian-born Kalpana Chawla, lost aboard the space shuttle Columbia in February, NASA has announced.

"I like to think that in the years, decades and millennia ahead, people will look to the heavens, locate these seven celestial sentinels and remember the sacrifice made by the Columbia astronauts," Raymond Bambery, head investigator of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's asteroid tracking project in Pasadena, California, said on Wednesday.

The Columbia's commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died on February 1.

As they re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, their Shuttle disintegrated 200,000 feet over Texas.

The asteroids were discovered at the Palomar observatory near San Diego, California on July 19-21 2001 by NASA astronomer Eleanor Helin.

The names have been approved by the International Astronomical Union.

Asteroids orbit the sun like the rest of the Solar System's planets, but are small, irregular in shape and most orbit in a belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, August 07, 2003