Biotech is where the action is

CRUCIAL ROLE: Work on in a biotech laboratory

BANGALORE IS still basking in the afterglow of Bangalore Bio 2005, and if the industry is looking at crossing the $ 5 billion mark by 2010, there is no reason to doubt that the biotech education sector is geared up to keep pace with the needs of the industry.

By all accounts, the 127 companies that make Bangalore the biggest biotech cluster in the country have lapped up all the doctorate and post-doctorates that ever ventured forth in search of a job, and even post-graduates and diploma holders have too many options to choose from.

Earlier, companies that were hiring found that candidates with impeccable qualifications were not quite what they were looking for.

The companies took to hiring and training them to meet specific job requirements. Since then, education has been playing catch-up.

Institutions and universities and colleges have acknowledged the inevitability of jumping on to the bandwagon, and steer the rush for degrees and doctorates towards research that can be speedily turned into products on field.

Bangalore University had started a B.Sc course in Biotechnology 10 years ago, as a vocational programme of the University Grants Commission. Currently, BU produces about 3,000 graduates and over 850 postgraduates in biotechnology each year.

To these numbers, the Visvesvaraya Technological University is adding nearly 800 students in B.E. biotechnology.

In demand

The IT and BT Secretary, M.K. Shankaralinge Gowda, said: "Postgraduates, doctorates and postdoctorate research fellows are the key talent for research in any area requiring intensive scientific knowledge and development.

They are much in demand in all streams of biotech: pharma, agri-biotech, dairy, veterinary sciences, and even basic science, clinical and drug formulations research."

Even law students can aspire to a piece of the biotech pie now.

With intellectual property rights and patent filing becoming the norm, the expert who can iron out the legal creases will always be in demand.

There is no dearth of qualified manpower. It is just that, often, the courses are not tailor-made, but biotech is not an exact science but a multi-disciplinary science that embraces all kinds of applications, from computers to nanotechnology to chemistry to other basic science subjects, Mr. Gowda points out.

For instance, the Central Food Technology Research Institute in Mysore would ideally like to have 1,000 Ph.Ds working on its niche area. But all it gets is 22.

When R and D in biotech is led by Ph.D holders, that limits the number of experiments and projects that a research centre can undertake.

Vital support

Biospectrum, a journal devoted to the biotech industry, notes that biotechnology education in the country has received great impetus and support first from the National Biotechnology Development Board and then from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

The National Biotechnology Development Board was established in 1982 and its very first mandate was human resource development as biotechnology is a very specialised domain and a knowledge-intensive field; development of infrastructure facilities; and support to R&D. Later, with the establishment of the DBT within the Ministry of Science & Technology in 1986, the mandate was taken over by this Department. And to date, there are about 70 courses being supported by DBT across the country.

Initially, biotechnology-teaching courses were introduced at the Master's level in Madurai Kamaraj University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Pune University.

Subsequently, the course was introduced in other universities. Today, most of the universities, agricultural universities and even the Indian Institutes of Technology have introduced biotech courses across the country.

They have not only gained acceptance at the master's level, but are also considered as one of the best courses being run in the country. The annual budget of DBT for human resource development is Rs. 10-15 crore. And to start a course in a university, it grants about Rs 1-1.5 crore for setting up the initial infrastructure and then the recurring support is about Rs. 25 lakh.

The total intake of students in the various DBT-supported postgraduate courses is around 840 per year.

Centres of excellence

The culture of DBT-supported courses gave a huge impetus to human resource generation, which fuelled research.

According to estimates, approximately 20 percent of the initial human resource generated was going into research.

The trend of qualified students making tracks for the U.S. has actually seen a downturn now, with options thrown up by the Centres of Excellence (CoEs) such as National Brain Research Centre (NBRC), National Institute of Immunology (NII), National Centre for Plant Genome Research, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS).

Wide ambit

These CoEs were established not only to promote research in specific areas (brain, cell culture, plant genomics) but also keeping the socio-economic problems and the question of job opportunities in view. These institutes absorb trained researchers within the country, but only a fraction of the research community makes it to them, mainly because of inadequate funding and infrastructure.

For the past year, Biospecturm has been publishing the Biospectrum Student, a quarterly referral handbook that guides the biotech student through the how and why of this "hot" new sunrise sector, and helps choose the right college.

Now, Karnataka has its own CoE, the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology, where students from all over the country are acquiring diplomas and degrees that will take them closer to their goal: of being where the action is i.e. computational biology, DNA recombinants, datamining to see what the genes say.

Prashansa Sharma, armed with an M.Sc in biochemistry, is now doing a lab course in biotechniques which will have applications in gene transformation. After the course, she would like to be part of a research team. Fascinating

Aditya Barve, doing a diploma in bioinformatics, would like to go into computational and systems biology. "Making sense of the way biology works at the gene level is fascinating." He would be happy doing research in India, but the U.S. beckons too, tantalisingly, where more things happen, and faster.

His classmate, Ameya Chaubal, is all chuffed about datamining and peering at the information that the DNA carries, and help research get to the bottom of it all.

Jayanti Memon, who is studing the same course as Prashansa, wants to be in research into the recombinant DNA technology that holds answers to many of life's mysteries. ALLADI JAYASRI