Thursday, February 23, 2017

INDIA BIOTECH SPECIAL.......India's BIG Revolution

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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