India's BIG
Revolution
A flagship government-funding programme has provided a
springboard to India's biotechnology industry by backing innovative and risky
projects other investors wouldn't touch. J Vignesh explores the impact of the
Biotechnology Ignition Grant which is in its fifth year
Sudeshna Adak had worked in the corporate healthcare industry
for more than a decade and wanted to start her own business. While that's
always a difficult proposition, her area of specialty--healthcare
devices--posed tougher challenges. It's not a sector where funds come easy.
Investors tend to shy away from biotechnology and medical devices startups
because of the long gestation periods and market uncertainties.
Luckily for Adak and her likes, a silent revolution in
biotechnology had been underway in the country since the summer of 2012 in the
unlikely form of a government grant. In February 2015, Adak successfully
applied for the Biotechnology Ignition Grant's Rs 50-lakh purse for her
one-year-old OmiX Research and Diagnostics Laboratories, a maker of
high-sensitivity biochips for detecting malaria.
“I knew a different way of redoing the technologies. I could
make it accessible to middle India,“ said Adak, 49. But, she acknowledged,
biotech is a risky space for investors. “It is very difficult to convince
anybody to give any financing.“
That is precisely why the Biotechnology Industry Research
Assistance Council, the government's nodal funding agency for the biotech industry,
conceptualized BIG. In the five years since the grant made its first call for
proposals in July 2012, it has supported more than 200 biotech and
healthcare-related projects by startups and individuals.
“More than 60 new startups have been established, more than 60
new (intellectual properties) have been generated, more than 600
high-technology employment have been fostered, and close to 20 products are in
validation stages, and five-seven products are in the market,“ said Renu
Swarup, Managing Director, BIRAC. “A number of startups are now securing
follow-on funding from angel (investors), (venture capitalists) and other
agencies, including from BIRAC.“
The Biotechnology Ignition Grant's 10th call for proposals that
concluded this week has received more than 300 applications.
“BIRAC's BIG initiative has served a catalysing role in helping
many a startup in life sciences,“ said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson of
Biocon Ltd, India's pioneering biotech company. “Business concepts (funded by
BIG) are diverse and cuttingedge, from diagnostics for TB and cancer, to
biofuels from sea weed, synthetic biology, nanotechnology-based drug delivery
and bio-scaffolds.“
THE BIG BEGINNING
BIRAC evolved out of an earlier programme of the Department of
Biotechnology in 2012 and was categorized as a not-for-profit agency. The BIG
programme evolved from a stakeholder consultation conducted over 2010-2012 by
the nodal biotech industry organisation, the Association of Biotech Led
Enterprises (ABLE), at the behest of DBT and BIRAC's predecessor. This
culminated in a report titled `Indian Biotechnology: The Roadmap to the Next
Decade & Beyond.' This document suggested for BIRAC to focus on designing
and implementing an earlystage seed fund for the biotechnology-related fields
of life sciences and medical technology.That suggestion was quickly transformed
into the Biotechnology Ignition Grant, which has kept a laser focus on the big
ideas and concepts over everything else. Teams and individuals with an idea can
also apply. All that the selection panel seeks is novelty of the idea, its
technical feasibility, potential for commercialisation, and the team's or
individual's competency. The screening is three-tiered.
The Biotechnology Ignition Grant is only the latest funding
vehicle of the Department of Biotechnology. Now wellestablished biotech
companies including Strand Life Sciences, Perfint Healthcare and Mitra Biotech
have benefitted from its earlier programmes--the Small Business Innovation
Research Initiative (SBIRI) and the Biotechnology Industry Partnership
Programme (BIPP). Funding from these is on shared-cost basis that requires
applicants to bear a part of the capital. BIG poses no such constraints. Also,
SBIRI and BIPP are not meant for idea-stage companies.
“The Indian SBIRI is not like the US's SBIR, which is for
early-stage innovations. Hence (it was felt that) India's human capital can not
be transformed for social and economic development without an early-stage
scheme like BIG,“ M K Bhan, who was helming DBT when BIG was conceptualized,
was quoted as saying in a BIRAC report titled `BIGKick Starting
Entrepreneurship-1st BIG Report-2015.' “BIG was designed as a `neighbourhood
scheme'--running the schemes at multiple places such that money goes with
mentorship. Mentorship is fundamental to this scheme.“
MENTOR ADVANTAGE
While Rs 50 lakh might seem like a small sum, it is the
mentoring and the connections that BIG facilitates that matter more.“The
projects are monitored by a technical high-power committee that has the best
scientists in India,“ said Arun Chandru, chief executive of Pandorum
Technologies, a Bengaluru-based human tissue engineering startup that was among
the first recipients of the Biotechnology Ignition Grant. The company has also
raised money from Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.The mentors
include eminent scientists and industry experts such as Ravikumar Banda,
managing director of molecular biology firm Xcyton Diagnostics, and Rohit
Srivastava, professor at IIT-Bombay. Applicants have immensely gained from this
mix of backgrounds.
Adak recalls when she was planning for a general-purpose
platform instead of a focused product. “I went into it a little naively, `do
you think you can fund it?' I then went to Venture Centre (a partner agency for
BIG), `can you help me with it?' What is technically flawed, what do I need to
change? They gave a lot of advice. I was pitching it as a general platform.
They said you need to pick a disease. I think it mattered a lot--the way we were
telling the story,“ said Adak.
BIG operates through partner incubators who channel its funds to
the applicants and, importantly, provide business and technical mentoring,
handholding for technology and IP management, and capacity building.
“One of the salient takeaways of BIG is that programmes become
successful if the partners have space and freedom to operate within a defined
framework,“ said K VijayRaghavan, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology.
“Feedback is continually sought and acted upon, thus keeping (BIG) nimble and
adaptable to the changing needs of the community.“
PARTNER NETWORKS
BIRAC initially partnered with three technology incubators--IKP
Knowledge Park in Hyderabad, the Foundation for Innovation and Technology
Transfer (FITT) at IIT-Delhi, and the Centre for Cellular And Molecular
Platforms (C-CAMP) in Bengaluru. In 2014, it added NCL-Venture Center in Pune
and KIIT Technology Business Incubator at KIIT University in Bhubaneswar.
“We have contributed from the conceptualization (of BIG),“ said
Taslimarif Saiyed, Director, C-CAMP. “Even before the first call, all rules and
regulations, it has been done with partners. In terms of implementation and
selection, we have always been here.“ About the grant, he said: “BIG is a
handsome funding for proof of concept. Whenever I have international visitors,
their jaws drop when I tell them that at the idea level we fund (the selected
teams) about $100,000.“ Arun Papaiah and Aditya Kulkarni, cofounders of Aten
Porus Lifesciences, a drug discovery startup focused on rare diseases, got
valuable advice on what data they needed to collect early on to showcase their
drug's capabilities. Aten, a BIG recipient, was attached to C-CAMP. Its first
drug is targeted at Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) disorder, or Childhood
Alzheimer's.
“Not many have experience in orphan diseases, but two of our
mentors were experienced,“ said Papaiah, the CEO. “Both our mentors told us to
collect conclusive data that our drug can enter the brain. It was an important
turning point for us. They told us to gather (this data) simultaneously as we
were working on the drug. We had wanted it to be the last step.“ The grant also
helps startups stitch crucial partnerships that can take their products
forward.“We were able to gain access to some ecosystem partners outside the
country... We were (also) able to tie up with Kidwai Memorial Institute of
Oncology for field trials, thanks to DBT,“ said Adarsh Natarajan, CEO of
AIndra, an affordable cervical cancer screening toolmaker. BIRAC has partnered
with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL) at the Judge Business
School, University of Cambridge, to give foreign exposure to BIG recipients.
ON FAST-FORWARD
According to V Balasubramanian, director at drug discovery
startup BugWorks and who has spent almost two decades in infection research and
anti-bacterial drug discovery at AstraZeneca India, the Biotechnology Ignition
Grant has evolved well over the years.
“Not only has BIG impacted the ecosystem, the ecosystem has also
impacted BIG,“ he said. “When BIG was rolled out, it was packed with
academicians driving decisions. We now have people who have come from the
industry. This is the huge evolution of BIG.Entrepreneurship can only be driven
by people who have seen battle scars.“ Like all evolving programmes, BIG, too,
has areas that need ironing. For one, Balasubramanian said, grant recipients
should not be charged for using services and infrastructure provided by BIRAC's
partner agencies. “Infrastructure should be free... 10 years down the line,
take 2x-3x. Take money from people who are successful,“ he said.That would need
some fine balancing.
“BIG grantees get subsidised rates for using the services of
BIRAC-supported incubators, which house high-end instrumentations.Remember, the
incubators need to be sustainable too,“ said Satya Prakash Dash, head of
strategic partnerships and entrepreneurship development at BIRAC.
Other small niggles include a dearth of connections to external
funding agencies and large companies as well as space. “We want to create
databases, like say, collating vendors. It will help startups. We are working
on interfacing private investors and big companies with our startups. We are
looking into how we can integrate startups with the state healthcare machinery,“
said Dash.
All said, this silent revolution is on the right path to push
forward India's biotech agenda.“This (BIG model) can certainly be extended to
other science and technology-led sectors like clean energy and artificial
intelligence,“ said Biocon's Mazumdar-Shaw. “BIRAC's stature as a provider of
early-stage seed funding is generating a large number of startups.At last
count, BIRAC has ignited over 100 startups and today, one in three startups in
the country are based on life sciences.“
J Vignesh
ET17FEB17
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