It was in 1999 that two young professionals (who happen to be married to each other) headed back to India to set up Genotypic Technology Ltd. Having taken his masters as well as a doctorate in biotechnology from the University of Madurai, Dr M C Raja had initially gone to Israel to work on the human genome project at the Weizmann Institute. He then moved to San Diego to work on a microbial genome project. Raja then worked on a human genome project funded by the US government at Chicago.

His wife Sudha too holds a PhD in biotechnology from Madurai university. Incidentally, Dr Sudha and Dr Raja together worked for QBI (Quark Biotech Institute), a genomics company in Israel.

Genotypic Technology Ltd is an innovative biotechnology research and development firm, specialising in improving and inventing techniques. Discovery of new genes for diagnosis and gene therapy targets are the chief goals of the company. indiamarkets met the duo to know more about their company.

indiamarkets: The biotech market in India is very small. What prompted you then to touch base here?
Dr Raja: India has established a name in the IT sector at the international level. Similarly, Indians can offer the best of bioinformatics services to the rest of the world. As Indians, there is no doubt that we will win the credibility of global biotech players. The same service can be offered through an office in US, but manpower costs are expensive; besides, it is difficult to get the right expertise. And then, India has a strong IT back-up. Above all, I love India.

indiamarkets: Still, why a company of your own?
Dr Raja: It’s a difficult question to answer. I do not like the academic set-up (US or elsewhere), wherein one’s credibility depends not on his/her capabilities, but on the other factors over which one does not have control. In fact, it depends on so many other people except yourself. On the other hand, in a company, you can really justify your capability. There is much less politics and more freedom.

indiamarkets: Does this scenario exist in the Indian universities also?
Dr Raja: Yes. Go to any university in any part of the world and you’ll find a hierarchy. Either you have to grow there or come out and do something on your own.

indiamarkets: They say that there is a woman behind every successful man – does that hold good in your case too?
Dr Raja: Of course.

indiamarkets: You have marketing offices in New York and Israel. Given the fact that the European Union’s laws are stringent, does your presence in Israel benefit you in any way?
Dr Raja: Having an office in Israel is of no big advantage to us. The only factor is that we worked there for sometime and so have good contacts. As of now, we have not penetrated deep into the European/US markets. Our immediate agenda is to establish ourselves in India first. Our clients in the US/ European markets want us to find out what genes are involved in a particular disease.

One can have an office anywhere in Europe, but there is no added advantage. I do agree that EU’s laws are very stringent, but when it comes to outsourcing work, there are no such laws that inhibit outsourcing. The main reason for this is that most of the transactions are through the Internet. Anyone can outsource work to any other firm in any part of the world.

indiamarkets: What are the services that you provide?
Dr Raja: We offer state-of-the-art molecular biology services like type I and type II cDNA microarrays, non-redundant cDNA library construction, full length cDNA construction from diseased tissues, differential gene expression analysis, fishing of genes involved in genetic metabolic disorders and technology development.

To be more specific, the need in the industry and academia is for full length genes. Of the nearly 40,000 genes in human body – not even 10,000 are full length clones. May be you have 5,000 guaranteed full length clones. So you need the full gene to do any research. Full length gene construction is one of our services.
Both our services are only specialised services.

Among the microbial services, we offer microbial screening and isolation service and strain improvement:

We get orders from other parties who have problem with cloning the full gene, which are more high tech and expensive. We do not take routine jobs like DNA sequencing alone.

indiamarkets: So your basic business model is service?
Dr Raja: We also do our own product development. But we concentrate more on service to customers. We take royalties for only the Indian scenario. For example if we make a gene for an American company, we will obtain license for India. We don’t intend to completely sell out.

indiamarkets: Do you offer bioinformatics services also?
Dr Raja: We are floating a joint venture with an IT company – Manvish Infotech. We will be offering a 3-month course in bioinformatics for biologists. The course is all set to begin in May. Today, bioinformatics professionals are in extreme demand. Biotechnology, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies need bioinformatics professionals for high value projects on drug design and development, gene sequencing and mapping, genomics, proteomics, growth hormones and others.

indiamarkets: The bust in IT industry has led to the slowdown of the US economy. As a direct consequence of this, companies are cutting down on expenditure and laying off employees. Don’t you think that it will lead to another bust if everyone forays into bioinformatics, not taking into account the demand?
Dr Raja: You will get the customers once you start the business. The use of bioinformatics in drug development will cut down the cycle time of introducing the product into the market. The Indian pharmaceutical companies knew about bioinformatics for a long time, but they did not use it because there was nobody who provided the service. But very soon, this scenario is going to change. In days to come, the bioinformatics professionals will be in great demand by these pharma companies.
However, it is not going to crash like the IT or the dotcom crash that happened recently. Bioinformatics is not 100 per cent IT. It is not like data entry or content generation. It is not service-oriented alone. There is lot of science involved here. There is a lot more research involved. Identifying the gene expression is one of the main parts of bioinformatics.

indiamarkets: You began your operations just last year – how do you place yourself?
Dr Raja: We have fairly identified our customers both here in India and abroad also. The manpower we have today is sufficient for us to provide service to the identified customers. I believe we have a potential to grow further, to a position where we can service many customers at a time.

indiamarkets: As a young entrepreneur who has worked on various projects in US universities, can you let us how you went about identifying customers?
Dr Raja: Search on the web, find companies that are likely to be interested in your services, write to them directly. Yet another way of identifying potential customers is to attend conferences, wherein you meet the people and do increase your network.

indiamarkets: What solutions can genetics offer for diseases like Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, etc?
Dr Raja: Right now, genetic solutions are used only for diagnostic purposes. Very little has come out on the medical front. We must develop mechanisms to replace a gene that is the root cause of the disease, with a proper gene. However, it takes time to develop such a mechanism. It will happen in future. As of now genetic solutions are used for diagnostic purposes only.

indiamarkets: Who has funded your company?
Dr Raja: None; it is all our own funds. We did approach VCs, but they take a lot of time to take decisions. It is not their fault because they are new to this field. We also get funds from contracts.

indiamarkets: Is it because of the risks involved in biotech that VCs are reluctant to fund biotech companies?
Dr Raja: Actually the risk involved is very less. Results are late, but they are not correlated to the risks involved. The margins of profits are much more in biotech than IT.

indiamarkets: If you compare the advances that US has made on the biotech front, where does India stand?
Dr Raja: Where are we? We are nowhere. We have many research institutes, but there is no university which has done, say 500 sequences in their whole lifetime.
At the start, when biotechnology was just evolving, when we used test tubes in labs, India could claim that we are on par with the rest of the world. Now we can’t claim even that. But the future is bright for India.

Dr Sudha: There are only one or two (Research Institutes in India research institute) that do modern high throughput biological research today.

Dr Raja: We have to follow the Israel model where you don’t manufacture equipment related to biotech, but you manufacture Intellectual Property. The more IPRs India holds, the stronger we become at the international fora. Manufacturing any equipment or instrument is not a big deal. People have already established themselves.

indiamarkets: It looks like India has suddenly woken up. Everyone is talking about biotechnology. Is it a hype?
Dr Raja: You cannot call it a hype. People are predicting that it is going to be like IT. The government is taking initiatives. New companies are emerging. Unlike IT, this will not fall because the running cost is very less. Once you have the instruments in place, the running cost is less. The market is there. We need to tap it!

indiamarkets: What is your opinion on the Biodiversity Bill?
Dr Raja: The government fears that the developed nations will exploit our resources. We don’t have the capacity to exploit. It is like sitting on a goldmine; neither are we digging ourselves nor are we allowing others to dig the mine.

When you have a law, you need to police. In this case, they cannot police it.
All the data we are using today is completely the one put up by the West. Then why shouldn’t we allow them to tap ours? We will go back to the stone age if we keep the data to ourselves. I feel that those who have drafted the Biodiversity Bill have been slightly narrow-minded.

It is because of this that we have failed to discover new drugs. The time has now come for pharma companies to gear up to exploit and discover new drugs.

indiamarkets: What are your future plans?
Dr Raja: We want to become a genomic company. Like Incyte Genomics (leading player in biotechnology in the international level), we will have our own database, particularly related to Indian tropical diseases and genes involved in Asian population. We will have big databases of genes and DNA sequences.