| Inaugurating the euro 5-million CDFD-SUN Centre of Excellence in Medical Bioinformatics at CDFD, the President said that particularly in the herbal area there are potential applications for developing multiple products for nutrition, prevention and cure of diseases. |
| Even though India ranks among the top few nations in having a rich bio-diversity, its share in global herbal product market is very minimal, he said. |
| According to Kalam, of the $61-billion global herbal market, China has a share of $6 billion while India's share is not even $1 billion. |
| "Knowledge-based value-addition for these natural resources would mean exporting value-added products rather than merely the raw material," Kalam said while suggesting the use of medical bioinformatics for leading herbal products into drug design, development and commercialisation. |
| Stating that India missed the opportunity in partnering the human genome project and thereby lost the utility of right type of data, the President asked the biomedical community to take the initiative in becoming a working partner in the proteomics project of gene characterisation, the logical extension of genomics. |
| Proteomics helps in understanding the development of diseases among other utilities. Proteomics resulting into a gene chip can become the future diagnosis and treatment regime for many diseases, he said. |
| M K Bhan, secretary, department of biotechnology, termed bioinformatics as a new paradigm of science. |
| Speaking on the occasion, he said that advanced computational bioinformatics would help discover new drugs and vaccines apart from disease mechanisms. Sushilkumar Shinde, Governor of Andhra Pradesh, presided over the function. |
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