Bio Intelligence

IT is now present in every walk of life and the biotech industry is no
different. The biotech market in India is estimated at Rs 11,000 crore with a
30% annual growth. Cost effectiveness and availability of quality talent makes
India a beehive, attracting global companies and other research institutes. With
research and technology in the biotech sector moving to greater and newer
frontiers and specialized fields, companies are adopting newer methods to
leverage themselves to reach higher levels in the value chain.

During the early stages the situation was a bit different, the research
activities more complex and time consuming. Though there has been progressive
development, the advent of information technology has made life sciences
research and development simpler, cost effective, and less time consuming. As
India becomes a major hub for biotech research, including innovative drug
discoveries, the implementation of IT is a real necessity.

The IT and biotechnology sectors are converging on all fundamental levels,
and the application of IT in biotech has become a major enabler for the huge
growth of this sector, says KK Narayanan, managing director, Matahelix.

Role of IT

IT has played a significant role in life sciences and has dramatically
reduced costs, increased speed, and improved the productivity of research and
development. Also, the induction of IT has helped organizations to find
e-solutions for data mining, knowledge management, and process management.

The most important application of IT in a biotech company is the ERP
application which is standard and widely accepted. It fits into the requirements
of our organization, says Radhakrishnan G, general manager systems, Biocon. An
ERP application handles manufacturing information in various stages like
capturing requirements, procuring materials, going through the quality assurance
check, and dispatching.

The development of new methods and technologies in researches, and increasing
demand for biotech products has made automation of processes and workflow
imperative. Biological sciences are data-intensive as a large amount of data is
generated from the researches. With this exponential increase in data, the need
for storage of data is also increasing. Many biotech firms spend huge amounts of
money on storage.

IT helps in creating a paperless lab by using various data storage facilities
like spreadsheet and word document, and helps in reducing manual processes and
errors in documentation. IT also helps in increasing the workflow in the
organization. Laboratory informatics helps in sharing data with peers,
researches, and customers, thus enabling researchers and academia with low cost
sequencing of data.

According to Sanjeev Kumar, CEO and managing director, Biocos, The
researches in wet labs are time consuming and frustrating, and cannot be reused,
but the reusability of IT will help. And by integrating IT and wet labs we can
create an embedded biotechnology, where some percent of the work is done
biotechnologically and some percent by IT. The number of cycles of an experiment
can also be reduced, further increasing the speed and making it cost effective.

IT provides various computational tools to collect and store information for
determination and future use, and this is where IT is becoming indispensable and
crucial in the biotech industry. In the biotech industry, the retention period
of document is very high so we need to have a good storage system and retrieval
mechanism. In this regard we have started implementing a document management
system (DMS), and we do have projects taken by our R&D, and also plan to
implement an enterprise project management portal, informs Radhakrishnan Menon,
general manager, Systems, Biocon. Another major advantage is that the new
compact hardware and software tools help companies reduce lab space and in turn
reduce cost.

According to KK Narayanan of Metahelix, Equipments manufacturers are
developing new IT-enabled equipments, and because of these the lab activities
are becoming much more streamlined. Research outputs are delivered quickly as
software helps in processing the data faster and better.

The advent and application of IT has brought a big transformation in the life
sciences industry, including biotech, agri-technology, and microbial technology.
The IT and software developments have aided the life sciences researchers with
abilities in formatting, searching, and analyzing disparate data sources and
types.

Apart from the hardware, software also plays a crucial role in research
activities. Some areas in which software is used are pre-processing, mining,
integration, analysis, inference, and display. In addition, the research in
clinical data management, trials, design, experiment, lab management, instrument
management, etc, is also hugely dependent on software.

The research in all the streams of life sciences is executed with the help of
high-end computers and algorithms. Starting from the storage of huge data sets
(high throughput data) to genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, interactomics,
sequence data, structure data, etc.

Embedded software has been a key in quality improvements and has greatly
helped in adapting reusability of already developed techniques and practices
into next generation products.

Key Challenges

The implementation of any new technology invites many challenges; even the
biotech industry has to overcome various hurdles before it takes a spirited
stroll on the IT route. The experimental data generated in the industry is in
different formats and uses various application platforms. So the major challenge
faced by biotech firms and researchers is to determine relationships between
data in different formats and platforms.

The data is stored in an unstructured manner and comes in different formats,
we have no standardization method for integrating the data. Data collection,
archiving, and processing from the database requires a common platform and high
storage space and devices, says Chellappa Gopalakrishnan, Chief Bio-informatics
Officer, Avesthagen. Also, ensuring the security of data is another major
concern for the industry.

Looking Ahead

The biotech industry in India is booming and witnessing a steady growth in
all stages from drug discovery to commercialization of various drugs. With the
incorporation of IT into biotech, it can facilitate a faster growth of research
and development in the country. The Indian biotech industry is growing from a
discovery point of view, and compliance and IP protection are the main drivers
for using IT in biotech says Freek Varossieau, manger, Agilent Lab Informatics,
Asia.

The increasing usage of IT in biotech has led to the identification of many
new streams in life sciences like bioinformatics, chemo-informatics, laboratory
informatics, health informatics, etc. IT is also used in imaging, image
processing, mathematical and statistical advanced algorithms for signal
processing areas like correlation, clustering, statistical image processing,
etc.

A rapidly growing market and increasing competition is forcing many biotech
firms to adopt IT for enhancing growth and productivity. Increasing complexity
of research and product development, need for a huge amount of analysis in drug
discovery and drug development are the major driving forces that make firms
adopt IT, says Anurag Gupta, managing director, Life Sciences, GE Healthcare.

The success of any drug, vaccine, or bio-pharma manufacturer depends on how
quickly the product can be brought to market, and how effective and efficacious
the product is. With increasing complexity in drug discovery, research and
development, the computing power of the systems used in such discovery,
research, and development plays a vital role. Computing power is not just a
function of high-speed chips, but also how intelligently and effectively the
software is written. This is where IT becomes important.

For example, in some of our unique high-end products GE Healthcare Life
Sciences uses the latest hardware technology backed by a very sophisticated
software platform to enable bio-tech or bio-pharma companies to undertake
relevant analysis in cellular level research, adds Anurag Gupta, managing
director, Life Sciences, GE Healthcare.

Pradeesh Chandran

pradeeshc@cybermedia.co.in