Ocimum Bio to launch three products this year

Speaking to Business Standard on the new products, Anuradha Acharya, the CEO of Ocimum Bio's Indian operations, said that iRNAwiz, to be launched by March-end, would cater to the analytics market in the drug discovery segment. iRNAwiz is already being used by a few clients of the company.

RNA interference (RNAi) technique is widely used in determining gene function in plants and animals. A promising area, the global analytics market for the tool is approximately $40 million. The company hopes the product would considerably boost its revenue stream.

Acharya said another bioinformatics tool, ToxCheck, had already been developed and would be productivised soon. The company, which has already a LIMS tool for biotech industry, is now targeting the pharmaceutical sector with an extension of its LIMS product, BioTracker.

Over 70 per cent of the product modules had been completed and a few pharma industry-specific modules are being put into place.The product is slated for launch by the end of this year.

A 60-strong team drawn from the biotechnology departments of IITs in the country is working on these off-the-shelf products, she said, adding that the team would be ramped by 20 this year.

The three-year-old pure-play bioinformatics player is also planning to offer contract research services by setting up a wet lab at ICICI Knowledge Park here for offering gene synthesis services to pharma and agricultural companies, and fermentation services of biologicals and non-biologicals. It has already taken space for the new project at the park.

The company has at present a suite of four products "� Genchek, Biotracker, OptGene and Genowiz. Biotracker, a laboratory performance improvement tool, is GLP (good laboratory practices) and US FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliant.

Genchek has an integral database system that can be used to access, store, organise and retrieve DNA, RNA, and protein sequences in an intuitive environment that offers editing, management and annotation of sequences.

Genowiz is a gene expression analysis programme used to store, process and visualise gene expression data. OptGene optimises naturally occurring genes to achieve higher productivity, at the same time giving higher flexibility for protein design. Nutrabase is a database archival and accessing tool.

The company's core research team, based in Indianapolis in the US, is already into contract research services supported by a wet lab. The state-of-the-art wet lab in the US provides sample tracking, nucleic acid and protein analysis with customised services.

The US operations is headed by a woman scientist, Sujatha. A privately-held company, Ocimum Bio is part of the city-based Ficus Enterprises, the world's largest producer of sulpha-methaoxazole and a major producer of ranitidine in India.

Assessing the performance of the company, she said consolidation of operations had been effected and "a dent has been made in the tough US market".

On the other markets, Acharya said the company had tied up with the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), Canada, which picked the Biotracker as its LIMS for DNA sequencing facility at Halifax. It also has a distribution tie-up with Germany's Scimax Scientific Software Distribution in Europe, and is putting together a marketing team in the UK.

Spurred by its success so far, the company has envisaged a road map to get into drug discovery research ultimately.

Acharya said the company was also taking up research and development in the fields of data mining, algorithm development, gene identification, multiple-platform software development, database creation and manipulation, and tools for image analysis.

The company sees huge scope for growth in the area of contract research segment. Its business model of IT-cum-biotech company is based on the premise that stand-alone IT, biotech companies have limited scope for growth, she said. Spurred by its success so far, the company has envisaged a road map to get into drug discovery research ultimately.

On the opportunities for India in bioinformatics, she said though India had a huge pool of skilled human resources, the players need to have combined strength of IT and BT expertise to survive. She pointed to several instances companies falling out for want of such expertise, long gestation periods and a huge capital base.