As a worldwide race to sift through genes, proteins, and create cellular libraries cranks up, a clutch of start-ups heads for a new frontier of opportunity on the cusp of biology and infotech. India's IT industry should too.

By Samar Halarnkar and Venkatesha Babu

Unwashed jeans, tousled hair, and rubber chappals. This seems to be the uniform of the students who inhabit the shaded avenues of giant rain trees, who walk the long corridors of the formidable, turn-of-the-century stone buildings of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. So it comes as a surprise when one such young straggler emerges from a stately professorial room and introduces himself as, well, a professor.

Prof Ramesh Hariharan? Ph.d from New York University and visiting professor at New York University and the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrucken, Germany? With research interests in string algorithms, sequence analysis, computational biology, and geometry? That's him. Prof Hariharan, 31, is a professor at IISC and, with three other Ph.ds in equally arcane topics-30-something professors Swami Manohar, Vijay Chandru, and V. Vinay-is a co-founder of Strand Genomics, a company at the cutting-edge of a new world.

The contrast with Strand's Chief Operating Officer (and acting CEO), Dr Srinivasan Seshadri, couldn't be greater. Seshadri, 35, formerly a director at Bell Labs and Chief Technology Officer of Lucent Technologies, is the epitome of infotech cool: mocassins and Friday dressing. As the first appearances indicate, Strand Genomics is the coming together of two worlds, the research-heavy world of biotechnology and the market-savvy world of infotech. The company's slogan: 'Algorithms for Life'. This novel union looks like a good idea. In a few months of sprouting forth from the labs of IISC, Strand Genomics has bagged a million dollar research contract from a US company and has attracted venture capital funding of $2.5 million.

A slew of such seemingly oddball start-ups are taking root in India, heralding not just a new business frontier, but a chance for the sunrise infotech sector and the nascent biotech sector to launch a lucrative, mutually beneficial relationship. Bioinformatics, as the union of biology and infotech is called, is a huge new opportunity, says H.F. Khorakiwala, Chairman of Wockhardt Ltd. Wockhardt, like many established drug companies-and like a handful of pure infotech companies-is also trying to get its foot in the door that could open into a market worth a few billions in the next five years. ''Being a leader in it makes us one of the most obvious destinations for any international player in bioinformatics,'' says Khorakiwala.

''When it comes to mathematics and science, India has been blessed with some truly remarkable genes,'' exclaims Norman Prouty, the American managing partner of ICF Ventures, a leading VC that is now funding a couple of biotech start-ups. Only, in the stealth mode that's seizing the field, he's cagey about revealing any figures. '''The current generation of entrepreneurs and scientists running the new start-ups,'' says Prouty rather grandly, ''is the incarnation of generation upon generation of gifted mathematicians, astronomers, and vedic philosophers''.

Appropriately, this is a story about genes

In February 2001, one of the most gargantuan scientific endeavours of our time concluded. Two rival molecular biologists published the entire human genome, the cumulative efforts of some of the finest minds and fastest computers of our times. Which means that if you so wish-and there are thousands of scientists, drug companies, and assorted helical seekers who do-you may now study the recipe for human life in all of its contortions. The last decade-and-a-half was truly the age of genomics. But the Human Genome Project, stunning as it was, is not journey's end. It's just the start. You could liken the outcome of the project-listing all our genes-to marking the bus stops in a city, not how to get from one stop to the next. The project found that you have the same number of genes-about 30,000, not 100,000 as previously thought-as the mouse in your kitchen. But what sets you apart from the mouse is not the number of genes, but the number and complexity of proteins that these genes produce.

You will hear heck of a lot about the study of these proteins in the coming years. This spin-off from genomics encompasses an even more fundamental and complicated field of study called Proteomics. The gargantuan task of deciphering proteins is not only essential to taking genomics further, but offers huge commercial potential in terms of new wonder drugs, therapies, even improved food crops. If the genome is the recipe of life, think of proteins as the ingredients.

Diseases are like spelling mistakes in a normal gene. The Human Genome Project today provides scientists with an instant spell-check and also equips them with tools to correct the defect. But it took seven years to detect the cystic fibrosis gene-the first 'disease gene'. Today, it would take seconds-on a computer database. Already, aided often by the power of information technology, information from the genome has helped detect more than 30 disease genes, including some for common diseases like breast cancer, colour blindness, and epilepsy.

There is urgent need for much more computing power. Genetic permutations and combinations run into the trillions, so the mountains of data thrown up by the genome project are today largely just chemical jumbles. They must be refined, cleaned up, and classified to be useful for pharma and biotech companies in new drugs and therapies.

It is far more difficult with proteins. Because proteins are far more complex than genes (See Latching On Early), sifting through them, managing the information required to record protein interactions with chemical pathways in human cells will require computing power in the order of terabytes, trillions of bits of data. Bioinformatics companies aim to build protein catalogues or databases, which could then be licenced to pharma companies.

In the most recent tie-up of its kind, Myriad Genetics Inc, best known for discovering the gene linked to hereditary breast cancer, formed a $185 million joint venture with Oracle-the world's second-largest software company-and Hitachi-Japan's largest electronics-maker-in April 2001. The venture will compile information gleaned on proteins and their interactions within human cells and make a proprietary database by 2004. Similarly, Celera Genomics Group, which completed mapping the human genome in 2000, has tied up with Compaq and the US Department of energy's Sandia National Laboratory, a hot bed of computer science. IBM, apart from a host of biotech-related work, is also investing $100 million to build 'Blue Gene', a superfast computer exclusively meant for bioinformatics.

Who'll crack the code?

RAMAN ROY CEO-SPECTRAMIND  e-SERVICES

Bioinformatics is a growing field in all other aspects of biotech as well. All of biotech, whether it concerns new drugs, genetically engineered crops, or vaccines, requires hardware and software support. Without it, modern biotech stands little or no chance of using the human genome to change our lives. And all this is hugely relevant to India's IT industry.

Caught in its first serious downturn after a decade of heady growth, the IT industry knows it must diversify its portfolio. Bioinformatics, already being touted as the next big thing worldwide, offers the Indian IT industry a great chance to do just that. ''We are gung ho about the prospects of the bioinformatics sector,'' enthuses Vivek Kulkarni, the infotech secretary-and now, in a prescient move, the biotech secretary as well-of the government of Karnataka, from where a third of India's $6.5 billion software exports originate.

Like the motley group of scientists who founded Strand Genomics, there is a clutch of similar new Indian start-ups, some with foreign partners, taking aim at this new kind of biotech-infotech convergence. ''The action happening is incredible,'' says Koen Wentink, the Dutch coo of Avestha Gengraine Technologies, a biotech start-up trying to produce drought- and pest-resistant rice. Avesthagen (as the company is called by its short name) has attracted angel funding of $2 million. Its cerebral CEO, Dr Villoo Morawala Patell, is a plant molecular biologist from the University of Louis Pasteur, France. With her research group, she holds several patent applications in gene discovery and functionality, gene transformation for rice and millet as well as tissue-culture techniques, bioinformatics, and gene-sequencing techniques. Clearly, the start-ups are allowing highly qualified Indian scientists to venture into the world of business.

Avesthagen has a staff of 40, many of them sourced from the bioinformatics faculty of the Madurai Kamraj University, the only one of its kind in India. In keeping with its credo of convergence, the company is appropriately headquartered with the IT elite in the sparkling first-world environs of Bangalore's tech park in Whitefield. ''We are not only doing pure research, but also carrying out contract research,'' says Wentink.

From the other shore, a handful of IT companies are taking a serious look at the opportunities offered by biotech's big push to the frontiers. Satyam Computer Services is beginning to offer bioinformatics services to its global clientele: any element of basic research, instrumentation, or laboratories is given to its alliance partner, in this case the government-run Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

Bangalore IT major Kshema Technologies, which launched a foray into bioinformatics nine months ago, is already providing customised software to two leading US health companies. ''Though our bioinformatics division is still very young, we see great potential ahead,'' says Anant Koppar, President and CEO of Kshema. ''This will be a focus area of growth for the company.'' To develop local expertise, Kshema, along with MDS Sciex, (part of the $1 billion Canadian health and life science company MDS Inc.) is sponsoring a bioinformatics research chair at the pes Institute for Technology, Bangalore.

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