The third and last day of the International Symposium on Bioinformatics and Genomics began with Dr Omkar Goswami, Chief Economist, Confederation of Indian Industry, opening the session. Attendance on the concluding day was just as strong as on the previous days. The presentations made were interesting and triggered active discussions amongst the gathering.

Dr Goswami made a strong case for creating high value businesses using biotechnology and bioinformatics which are currently mostly restricted to the academia in India -- we need to transform the findings of biotechnology into high value business propositions. This needs thinking and communicating. There are certain constraints that need to be dealt with on a priority basis in Asia in general and in India specifically.

One factor is venture capital (VC) constraints.  There is a large corpus of venture capital in India, lower end estimates of which would be about two billion dollars and three and a half billion dollars at the higher end. The main problem with VCs is that while they understand the IT industry, they do not know much about the biotech business. VCs are not aware of who is doing what in the Indian biotech industry and how it will develop, what model to adopt and how to structure the model. Much greater awareness and domain knowledge about the biotech sector needs to be developed amongst the VCs in India so as to enable them to fund this industry.

Secondly, what is needed is greater communication/ interaction between biotech scientists and VCs -- generally, scientists and physicists are the worst communicators. Biotech scientists understand only people who speak their language -- but communication between scientists and VCs is crucial if the aim is to commercialise scientific research. While it is important to write scientific papers, they are understood by a small number of people only.  Increasingly, it is being felt that ‘great’ science can also be leveraged into businesses without sacrifing the cause of science -- the aim should be to generate wealth. Therefore, communication between scientists, VCs and corporates is very important.

About 90 per cent of joint ventures between industry and scientific institutions are short changed in India. The academic institutions merely rent space and get a small income from it. But, there are few real joint ventures – all because of lack of communication.

Thirdly, there are the organisational constraints. There are too many committees/departments and too much of bureaucracy in India, he said. While India has some of the best mathematicians, statisticians and economists, what we also need is people from these areas who are ready to take entrepreneurial risks.

VCs will not fund anything that is not a company or is a non-corporate entity. Academic institutions therefore must set up corporate entities within themselves. Such a development will neither affect academic institutions negatively nor make them lesser research institutes. This view has to change. There has to be a change in this organisational mindset amongst academicians. There are institutes in India that are giving away information cheaply, which should not be the case. "We must find ways of corporatising without changing the character of academic institutions," said Dr Goswami.

He added, “Yes, there is a people constraint. There is a huge market for manpower, for those who understand biotech and bioinformatics. But we have to address this issue and act soon. We need both government and institution support for this task.”

Eventually, if India is aiming at good business without sacrificing science, we also need managers with top class managerial expertise who deliver on time. We need good scientists and we need good managers.