Over the past few years, the healthcare sector has hugely benefited from research and advancement of bio technology in India. During a lecture, professor Govindarajan Padmanaban discussed the various ways it has brought a change in diagnostics and medicine. By Shrabasti Mallik
There are a number of things in the field of medicine and agriculture that were almost unthinkable of a couple of years ago. Thanks to the advent and advancement of technology we are now giving shape to the most complex ideas. When we combine the potential of biology with technology, the results are more varied, faster and effective. Over the past few decades bio-technology and molecular biology have entered many fields — diagnostics, medicine, agriculture, gene therapy and synthetic biology.
At the 51st foundation memorial lecture of Sriram Institute for Industrial Research, Govindarajan Padmanaban, scientist and professor at the Indian Institute of Science, deliberated on ‘The Growth of Bio Technology in India.’ The Padmashree awardee was among the founder members of The National Biotechnology Board (NBTB) which was started in 1982 as part of the Department of Science and Technology (DST). It subsequently got upgraded to a full-fledged Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in 1986.
At present, the biotech industry is growing at the rate of 20 per cent with revenues over four billion US dollars. According to a magazine, biopharmaceuticals contribute about 60 per cent to the growth while bioagri is responsible for 23 per cent, bioservices for 15.5 per cent and bioinformatics contribute about 9.6 per cent to the growth.
Padmanaban informed that India entered the era of modern biotechnology with the introduction of the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine. “Shantha Biotechnics made the first revolution of a modern vaccine — recombinant hepatitis B vaccine in India. It was the first company to have used Pichia pastoris to make a recombinant protein,” he said and added that these projects were initially supported by DST. “The price of imported hepatitis B vaccine in the beginning was Rs475 a dose and perhaps UNICEF subsequently procured the vaccine from India at Rs20 a dose,” he added.
The use of bio technology in lab research has, since then, proven to be successful time and again. The recent breakthrough being the successful launch of the rotavirus vaccine. This was the result of two decades of research and development to protect rotavirus-mediated diarrhoea, which at one stage accounted for 40 per cent of hospitalised children’s disease. “Today, India can claim to be the global leader in the area of vaccines,” said the scientist.
Similarly, India is making around 20 biogeneric molecules like erythropoietin, GCSF, serum albumin, streptokinase, interferon alpha 2b and rituximab(MAB) anti-EGFR (MAB) amongst many others. Even molecular diagnostics has benefited from bio technology. Sustained efforts have led to the development of diagnostics for a variety of diseases. Some of the tests that utilise molecular diagnostics are enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ElISA), lateral flow, fluorescence readers for HIV/HBV/HCV/malaria/cancer markers et al.
India’s leadership in vaccines can be extended to include biogenerics. “It needs to move into making at least 50 biogenerics, creating several brands for the products already developed. The monoclonal antibody (MAB) sector for diagnosis and therapy affords a great opportunity,” Padmanaban pointed out. India should use modem technology for drug/vaccine delivery and this would call for the use of VlPs (virus-like-particle), nasal, oral and dermal routes for their delivery.
In the molecular diagnostic sector, use of bio nanotechnology can push the limits of sensitivity to femtomole levels. A major opportunity has arisen with the genome sequences of a large number of organisms already available. These sequences have become the source for analysis to provide new drug and diagnostic targets. In the field of agriculture genomes are being analysed to fish out genes that are responsible for favourable traits in the crops. Therefore, big data analytics has become a major service sector and India and the IT sector can also play an important role.
“Stem cell biology is an area of great promise. But, at the present time, it is still in the realm of clinical research and not validated for therapy as such. Except in a few cases such as the use of limbal progenitor cells to regenerate ocular surface in corneal disease and classical bone marrow transplantation,” said Padmanaban.
Gene therapy is another area that has all along moved one step forward and two steps backward in the last three decades. More recently, there is promise of gene therapy in leber’s Congenital Amarousis, a rare inherited eye disease and blood-borne genetic disorders. A new emerging area in India is synthetic biology. This area was born more than a decade ago in the developed world with the challenge — whether engineering principles can be used to create biological networks that can give rise to a wide variety of products.
There are challenges in building biological networks in Escherichia coli or yeast with a battery of genes, repressors, promoters et al. It also calls for technology to clone and analyse large chunks of DNA that can house many genes constituting sets of pathways to give rise to designer products. The scientist explained, “The leverage is on the fact that the bio particles are so tiny that they can enter the cell structure and therefore holds the ability to change the entire gene structure.”
India will exceed China in population growth within the next few years. India’s agricultural productivity is 30-50 per cent in terms of world average for almost any crop. “It is important, therefore, for India to vigorously pursue technology to increase productivity in farming and agriculture. For that it is necessary to choose the best technology option based on the crop, trait, sustainability and affordability. It can be MAS or GM or a combination of strategies such as the use of crop rotation, organic and non-pesticide technologies,” he concluded.