LOT OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR RETUNING SCIENTISTS IN BIOTECH AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
The return of the Lab
Subba Rao Gangi Setty spends much of his time in a small cabin with an old fan whirring above. After arriving in Bangalore in July last year, the cell biologist has set up a lab at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology in the Indian Institute of Science to study a disease called the Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome (HPS), a type of albinism. One of a handful of senior fellows supported by a joint funding programme of the Wellcome Trust, UK, and the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Setty, a Green Card holder, returned to a much lower salary and an un-airconditioned office so he could pursue science in India. “I went to government schools and studied on government scholarships. I felt I owed it to my country to come back and do quality science here,” says the 37-year-old from Porumamilla village, Kadappa district, Andhra Pradesh, who spent over a decade in the US—long enough that he now rolls his r’s.
Raring for a change after nine years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, Setty began looking out for opportunities in the biotech industry in 2009. The recession was setting in at the time, but with two Nature papers and several other high-quality publications to his name, he found work at Proteostasis Therapeutics, a small molecule drug company in Boston. For a year, he worked on modulation of cell biological pathways to cure protein folding defects implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. “It was then that I learned about the Wellcome Trust-DBT fellowship. I had been eager to come back to India since 2006, but now, an opportunity presented itself,” he says.
A silver Macbook sits on Setty’s desk. All around, there are piles of boxes. “The department is moving to a new building soon. Hopefully I’ll get more space,” he says. The money here may not compare with what he was making in the US, but a five-year research grant of Rs 4.58 crore fully supports his research programme. (Tissue culture, cell biological reagents and microscopy are pricey). With a newly-put-together team of eight researchers, Setty is now studying protein transport pathways in cells to understand the biology behind HPS and to develop cell biological screens for albinism with lung fibrosis. He has also set up an informal network and support group for people with HPS in India.
“It’s a good time to return to India,” says Vatsala Thirumalai, who leads a group on neural circuits and development at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), a Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) centre in Bangalore. A research scientist at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, till about a year ago, Thirumalai has set up a zebrafish incubator facility at NCBS to study the development of the brain in embryos. Hundreds of these nearly-transparent fresh water fish swim frantically in special tanks in her lab. Zebrafish are widely used in the biotech industry for drug screening, and Thirumalai, during her post-doctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, showed that neural networks for swimming develop very early in zebrafish, but are kept dormant until later.
“Earlier, working in India meant you were cut off. Now, I regularly Skype with my collaborator at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego,” says the 36-year-old, also a Wellcome Trust-DBT India fellow. “Government initiatives like the Ramanujan Fellowship, the Ramalingaswami Fellowship and the DBT-Wellcome Trust Fellowship have helped immensely in attracting talent back to India. Also, India is now a full member of the international Human Frontier Science Program that funds research in life sciences,” she says.
There is a sense among academics that it is easier than ever to obtain funding and forge collaborations in India. A number of factors have contributed to this: cuts in research spend in the US, the Indian Government’s pro-active support to science, a maturing biotech industry, better research output, a new crop of research institutes, and last but not the least, the image of India as an emerging scientific superpower.
Dozens of Indian researchers working in biological sciences are leaving foreign shores for home. This “trickle” of scientists, many of whom own valuable intellectual property, is set to grow considerably in the coming years, says Vijay Chandru, chairman and CEO of Strand Life Sciences—a genomics solutions and bioinformatics company based in Bangalore—and president of the Association of Biotech-led Enterprises (ABLE), a trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry. Chandru, a former computer science professor at IISc, believes that with joint efforts by industry and government, biotech could be the next major ‘reverse brain drain’ sector after IT.
From a small industry in the early 1990s, biotechnology in India has grown to a $4 billion sector of possibility. There are about 350 companies, most of them located in seven clusters across India—Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. “Since 2003, the industry has been growing steadily at over 20 per cent per annum. If we maintain this, we will be a $100 billion industry by 2025,” says Chandru. This growth could be spurred by demand for biosimilars—a new generation of protein-based drugs that could replace important biopharmaceuticals when they go off patent—and an expanding healthcare industry.
Strand Life Sciences, which has about 130 employees working out of an open-plan fifth-floor office in a business park on Bellary Road, Bangalore, has brought back 25 PhDs from the US in the last few years. “We were looking for people who could work with microarrays and high-tech equipment. So we hired researchers from NIH and other known institutes, mostly through referrals,” Chandru says.
Veena Hedatale is one such hire. A plant geneticist by training and a senior scientist at Strand, Hedatale gave three years to the US pharma industry before she decided to move back to Bangalore, where her family lives. An opportunity in the private sector that kept her in sync with happenings in biopharmaceuticals was just what she needed. “There is a huge difference in salaries between India and the US, but I was prepared for that,” says Hedatale, who just completed two years at Strand and hopes to start a product development company of her own one day.
Sushmita Gowri Sreekumar, another aspiring entrepreneur who joined the company about a year ago after completing a PhD programme in Zurich, says she sees a lot of promise in the Indian biotech sector. “When I decided to come back in June 2009, I knew I’d get a job or start my own diagnostics company. The number of institutes and biotech companies coming up in India is reassuring,” says Sreekumar, who has a PhD in cancer genetics.
FMCG majors like Unilever and ITC, too, are lapping up their share of the diaspora pie, says Amitabha Majumdar, a former post-doc at Cornell University, New York, who took up a position as a cell biologist at Unilever’s Whitefield office in January. “This opportunity was an excellent one. And it came at a time when many of my friends were planning to move back to India,” he says. According to Majumdar, Unilever Bangalore has hired at least four Indians from Yale, Oxford and Johns Hopkins Universities in just the last year. “A few years ago, there weren’t many cell biologists in India. Now I know many in Bangalore who are working in the same areas as I am,” says the 38-year-old who is researching immunity in cells. His wife, who just finished her PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is all set to join Indian biotechnology major Biocon.
Even as pharma and biotech companies in the West are laying off employees, India is looking for quality researchers to fill positions at new biosciences institutes such as the five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Faridabad, and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) at NCBS, Bangalore. NCBS alone is responsible for bringing back half-a-dozen researchers in the last couple of years.
John Mercer, a professor at McLaughlin Research Institute, Montana, US, moved to Bangalore two months ago to run a high-throughput mice facility at inStem to help understand the molecular bases of inherited cardiomyopathy—a chronic disease of the heart muscle and one of the leading causes of cardiac death. “I see potential in the willingness of the Indian Government to invest in research. From my perspective, the US and Europe are turning away from their commitment to research and education while India's commitment is increasing,” he says. The project, a collaboration between inStem, NCBS, Mercer’s home institute and Stanford University, among others, is funded entirely by the Indian Government. Mercer, who plans to stay on for two to five years, says he and his wife Colleen Silan are here for “the opportunity and the adventure”.
“A lot of money is being pumped into scientific infrastructure. It’s a positive sign for those looking to come back,” says Thirumalai.
Kundan Sengupta agrees. After a six-year-long association with the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Sengupta moved base to Pune in July 2010. Now an assistant professor at IISER, Pune, the intermediate fellow of the Wellcome Trust-DBT India alliance is investigating how a basic biologic question: how do chromosomes find their correct location within a cell? “The growth of the biotech industry as well as the government’s research-oriented policies have encouraged many abroad to return to both academia and industry in India,” he says.
“It’s not just biotech, all of Indian bioscience is attracting diaspora back to India,” says Archana Purushotham, who moved to Bangalore four months ago to join inStem as a visiting scientist. A stroke specialist with experience in neuroimaging and research at Stanford University, Purushotham says inStem provided her with a unique opportunity. “It has truly been an exploratory expedition. As a practising physician who wants to spend a significant portion of time on research, some of it non-clinical, there is not much precedent in India. So it has been a challenge to blend both my worlds, and I am still in the process of trying to get it to work,” she says.
There are other, less obvious, draws. When Kaustuv Datta completed his Masters course from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1997, there were few good places in India where he could have pursued a PhD, prompting him to join the University of Michigan in the US. After nine years that he spent acquiring a PhD in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and then doing post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan and the Scripps Research Institute, Datta returned to India in 2010 to join the University of Delhi as an assistant professor. While there is more money and infrastructure for research in the field now, Datta says it is the freedom to pursue “risky projects” at Indian universities that prompted his return.
“Tenure system is very strict in US universities. At the end of five to seven years as a post-doctoral fellow, you are evaluated on the number of papers published in that time and so on and granted tenure. It is a make or break system and prevents people from taking up risky projects. Universities here provide more secure positions, and independence to take up projects as you wish. This is a place where you can find your own identity as a researcher instead of being a post-doctoral fellow abroad working on someone else's ideas,” he says.
There are, however, serious challenges to tapping the biotech diaspora. Biotech research entails considerable capital outlay and doesn’t lend itself to entrepreneurship the way IT does. And unlike IT professionals, biotech researchers often do long post-doctoral stints, so by the time they have established themselves and are ready to move back, they are already pushing 40. “Displacement becomes much harder then. The kids are already grown up and they don’t want to move. To come back to India at such a point in one’s life, the terms have to be very attractive,” says Vijay Chandru, speaking from experience.
Sitting in her office surrounded by the smells of the lab, Vatsala Thirumalai is hopeful India will get its due. “As Thomas Friedman would say, the world of biosciences is now truly flat,” she says.
Sunrise Sector
* The Indian biotech industry, currently worth about $4 billion, has witnessed double-digit growth every year since the mid-2000s. Estimates project that with a growth rate of 20 per cent per annum, the industry will cross $10 billion in the next five years and hit $100 billion by 2025
* Biopharmaceuticals constitute about 60 per cent of the industry, with the remaining 40 per cent coming from bioservices and bioagri technology
* Biosimilars are a potential gold mine of opportunity.
Developing a biosimilar molecule in India requires an investment of $10-20 million, compared to $50-100 million in developed countries, according to industry estimates
(Inputs by Garima Mishra and Nandini Thilak 30O1011
The return of the Lab
Subba Rao Gangi Setty spends much of his time in a small cabin with an old fan whirring above. After arriving in Bangalore in July last year, the cell biologist has set up a lab at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology in the Indian Institute of Science to study a disease called the Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome (HPS), a type of albinism. One of a handful of senior fellows supported by a joint funding programme of the Wellcome Trust, UK, and the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Setty, a Green Card holder, returned to a much lower salary and an un-airconditioned office so he could pursue science in India. “I went to government schools and studied on government scholarships. I felt I owed it to my country to come back and do quality science here,” says the 37-year-old from Porumamilla village, Kadappa district, Andhra Pradesh, who spent over a decade in the US—long enough that he now rolls his r’s.
Raring for a change after nine years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, Setty began looking out for opportunities in the biotech industry in 2009. The recession was setting in at the time, but with two Nature papers and several other high-quality publications to his name, he found work at Proteostasis Therapeutics, a small molecule drug company in Boston. For a year, he worked on modulation of cell biological pathways to cure protein folding defects implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. “It was then that I learned about the Wellcome Trust-DBT fellowship. I had been eager to come back to India since 2006, but now, an opportunity presented itself,” he says.
A silver Macbook sits on Setty’s desk. All around, there are piles of boxes. “The department is moving to a new building soon. Hopefully I’ll get more space,” he says. The money here may not compare with what he was making in the US, but a five-year research grant of Rs 4.58 crore fully supports his research programme. (Tissue culture, cell biological reagents and microscopy are pricey). With a newly-put-together team of eight researchers, Setty is now studying protein transport pathways in cells to understand the biology behind HPS and to develop cell biological screens for albinism with lung fibrosis. He has also set up an informal network and support group for people with HPS in India.
“It’s a good time to return to India,” says Vatsala Thirumalai, who leads a group on neural circuits and development at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), a Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) centre in Bangalore. A research scientist at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, till about a year ago, Thirumalai has set up a zebrafish incubator facility at NCBS to study the development of the brain in embryos. Hundreds of these nearly-transparent fresh water fish swim frantically in special tanks in her lab. Zebrafish are widely used in the biotech industry for drug screening, and Thirumalai, during her post-doctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, showed that neural networks for swimming develop very early in zebrafish, but are kept dormant until later.
“Earlier, working in India meant you were cut off. Now, I regularly Skype with my collaborator at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego,” says the 36-year-old, also a Wellcome Trust-DBT India fellow. “Government initiatives like the Ramanujan Fellowship, the Ramalingaswami Fellowship and the DBT-Wellcome Trust Fellowship have helped immensely in attracting talent back to India. Also, India is now a full member of the international Human Frontier Science Program that funds research in life sciences,” she says.
There is a sense among academics that it is easier than ever to obtain funding and forge collaborations in India. A number of factors have contributed to this: cuts in research spend in the US, the Indian Government’s pro-active support to science, a maturing biotech industry, better research output, a new crop of research institutes, and last but not the least, the image of India as an emerging scientific superpower.
Dozens of Indian researchers working in biological sciences are leaving foreign shores for home. This “trickle” of scientists, many of whom own valuable intellectual property, is set to grow considerably in the coming years, says Vijay Chandru, chairman and CEO of Strand Life Sciences—a genomics solutions and bioinformatics company based in Bangalore—and president of the Association of Biotech-led Enterprises (ABLE), a trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry. Chandru, a former computer science professor at IISc, believes that with joint efforts by industry and government, biotech could be the next major ‘reverse brain drain’ sector after IT.
From a small industry in the early 1990s, biotechnology in India has grown to a $4 billion sector of possibility. There are about 350 companies, most of them located in seven clusters across India—Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. “Since 2003, the industry has been growing steadily at over 20 per cent per annum. If we maintain this, we will be a $100 billion industry by 2025,” says Chandru. This growth could be spurred by demand for biosimilars—a new generation of protein-based drugs that could replace important biopharmaceuticals when they go off patent—and an expanding healthcare industry.
Strand Life Sciences, which has about 130 employees working out of an open-plan fifth-floor office in a business park on Bellary Road, Bangalore, has brought back 25 PhDs from the US in the last few years. “We were looking for people who could work with microarrays and high-tech equipment. So we hired researchers from NIH and other known institutes, mostly through referrals,” Chandru says.
Veena Hedatale is one such hire. A plant geneticist by training and a senior scientist at Strand, Hedatale gave three years to the US pharma industry before she decided to move back to Bangalore, where her family lives. An opportunity in the private sector that kept her in sync with happenings in biopharmaceuticals was just what she needed. “There is a huge difference in salaries between India and the US, but I was prepared for that,” says Hedatale, who just completed two years at Strand and hopes to start a product development company of her own one day.
Sushmita Gowri Sreekumar, another aspiring entrepreneur who joined the company about a year ago after completing a PhD programme in Zurich, says she sees a lot of promise in the Indian biotech sector. “When I decided to come back in June 2009, I knew I’d get a job or start my own diagnostics company. The number of institutes and biotech companies coming up in India is reassuring,” says Sreekumar, who has a PhD in cancer genetics.
FMCG majors like Unilever and ITC, too, are lapping up their share of the diaspora pie, says Amitabha Majumdar, a former post-doc at Cornell University, New York, who took up a position as a cell biologist at Unilever’s Whitefield office in January. “This opportunity was an excellent one. And it came at a time when many of my friends were planning to move back to India,” he says. According to Majumdar, Unilever Bangalore has hired at least four Indians from Yale, Oxford and Johns Hopkins Universities in just the last year. “A few years ago, there weren’t many cell biologists in India. Now I know many in Bangalore who are working in the same areas as I am,” says the 38-year-old who is researching immunity in cells. His wife, who just finished her PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is all set to join Indian biotechnology major Biocon.
Even as pharma and biotech companies in the West are laying off employees, India is looking for quality researchers to fill positions at new biosciences institutes such as the five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Faridabad, and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) at NCBS, Bangalore. NCBS alone is responsible for bringing back half-a-dozen researchers in the last couple of years.
John Mercer, a professor at McLaughlin Research Institute, Montana, US, moved to Bangalore two months ago to run a high-throughput mice facility at inStem to help understand the molecular bases of inherited cardiomyopathy—a chronic disease of the heart muscle and one of the leading causes of cardiac death. “I see potential in the willingness of the Indian Government to invest in research. From my perspective, the US and Europe are turning away from their commitment to research and education while India's commitment is increasing,” he says. The project, a collaboration between inStem, NCBS, Mercer’s home institute and Stanford University, among others, is funded entirely by the Indian Government. Mercer, who plans to stay on for two to five years, says he and his wife Colleen Silan are here for “the opportunity and the adventure”.
“A lot of money is being pumped into scientific infrastructure. It’s a positive sign for those looking to come back,” says Thirumalai.
Kundan Sengupta agrees. After a six-year-long association with the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Sengupta moved base to Pune in July 2010. Now an assistant professor at IISER, Pune, the intermediate fellow of the Wellcome Trust-DBT India alliance is investigating how a basic biologic question: how do chromosomes find their correct location within a cell? “The growth of the biotech industry as well as the government’s research-oriented policies have encouraged many abroad to return to both academia and industry in India,” he says.
“It’s not just biotech, all of Indian bioscience is attracting diaspora back to India,” says Archana Purushotham, who moved to Bangalore four months ago to join inStem as a visiting scientist. A stroke specialist with experience in neuroimaging and research at Stanford University, Purushotham says inStem provided her with a unique opportunity. “It has truly been an exploratory expedition. As a practising physician who wants to spend a significant portion of time on research, some of it non-clinical, there is not much precedent in India. So it has been a challenge to blend both my worlds, and I am still in the process of trying to get it to work,” she says.
There are other, less obvious, draws. When Kaustuv Datta completed his Masters course from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1997, there were few good places in India where he could have pursued a PhD, prompting him to join the University of Michigan in the US. After nine years that he spent acquiring a PhD in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and then doing post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan and the Scripps Research Institute, Datta returned to India in 2010 to join the University of Delhi as an assistant professor. While there is more money and infrastructure for research in the field now, Datta says it is the freedom to pursue “risky projects” at Indian universities that prompted his return.
“Tenure system is very strict in US universities. At the end of five to seven years as a post-doctoral fellow, you are evaluated on the number of papers published in that time and so on and granted tenure. It is a make or break system and prevents people from taking up risky projects. Universities here provide more secure positions, and independence to take up projects as you wish. This is a place where you can find your own identity as a researcher instead of being a post-doctoral fellow abroad working on someone else's ideas,” he says.
There are, however, serious challenges to tapping the biotech diaspora. Biotech research entails considerable capital outlay and doesn’t lend itself to entrepreneurship the way IT does. And unlike IT professionals, biotech researchers often do long post-doctoral stints, so by the time they have established themselves and are ready to move back, they are already pushing 40. “Displacement becomes much harder then. The kids are already grown up and they don’t want to move. To come back to India at such a point in one’s life, the terms have to be very attractive,” says Vijay Chandru, speaking from experience.
Sitting in her office surrounded by the smells of the lab, Vatsala Thirumalai is hopeful India will get its due. “As Thomas Friedman would say, the world of biosciences is now truly flat,” she says.
Sunrise Sector
* The Indian biotech industry, currently worth about $4 billion, has witnessed double-digit growth every year since the mid-2000s. Estimates project that with a growth rate of 20 per cent per annum, the industry will cross $10 billion in the next five years and hit $100 billion by 2025
* Biopharmaceuticals constitute about 60 per cent of the industry, with the remaining 40 per cent coming from bioservices and bioagri technology
* Biosimilars are a potential gold mine of opportunity.
Developing a biosimilar molecule in India requires an investment of $10-20 million, compared to $50-100 million in developed countries, according to industry estimates
(Inputs by Garima Mishra and Nandini Thilak 30O1011
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excellent....
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