Back Of The Book: Genetic Dream Team

BACK OF THE BOOK
Genetic Dream Team

Pharma giant Nicholas Piramal scoured the world for the best talent to staff its new biotech project. And except one, the crack 12-member team is all woman.

By T.R. Vivek

Susmita Ghosh, 35, and Mausmi Bharadwaj, 36, could handle DNA analysers in their sleep. After slogging it out at some of the best biotech labs in the US, the helical intricacies of life come easy.

In the predominant Indian male view, Ghosh and Bharadwaj, clad in simple sari and salwar kameez, could pass for housewives next door. But the two senior scientists, based in Delhi, are part of a unique 12-member ''GeneQuest dream team'', cobbled together to map the genetic footprints of three common disorders: asthma, diabetes, and schizophrenia.

GeneQuest, as the company is called, is a pioneering effort by pharma major Nicholas Piramal Ltd (NPL) into the hot area of pharmacogenomics, which aims to tailor drugs after spotting the minute genetic variations which distinguish humans from one another.

TREADMILL

The Pre-date Workout

It's the adonis zone and never mind whether you have a double chin or an ample beer belly, you too can get there. Adonis zone is what Treadmill calls the immediate two-to-three hours after a workout, when your testosterone levels are at the highest and you are arguably at your best in bed. You may want to rush off and change your workout time (from early morning to late evening!) but first the facts. A good workout forces blood away from internal organs into your muscles and, of course, it also causes a temporary surge in testosterone. But the catch is you have to exercise vigorously to get into that zone. For those who want to give it a try this weekend, Treadmill offers a quick workout schedule to help you get going. My tip: do one-to-three sets of 8-15 reps of each of these exercises and use slightly lighter weights than you would normally do:

Bench press: Lie on your back on a flat bench and get a shoulder wide overhand grip on the bar. Lower the bar to your chest, pause, and then push it back till your arms are straight. That's one rep. If you don't like bench presses with barbells, do dumbbell presses instead.

Squats: Rest a bar on your trapezius muscles and slowly lower your body as if you're going to sit on a chair. Keeping your back straight, go down till your thighs are parallel to the floor, pause, and then straighten up. That's a rep. Repeat. If you have a back problem, don't do squats with weights. Instead, try leg presses or a leg extension-leg curl combo.

Seated rowing: Sit at a seated row station, hold the bar with an over hand grip, with arms extended in front of you. Keep your back straight, shoulders back, and chest flared. Pull the bar to your abdomen, pause, and then slowly return to the initial position. Alternatively, do bent over dumbbell rowing but get someone in the gym to spot for you.

Bicep curls: Hold an EZ bar with a waistwide underhand grip. Stand with your arms extended downward and the bar resting against your upper legs. Keep arms tucked against your sides and curl bar as high as you can without swinging your upper arms forward. Pause and return to starting position.

Tricep presses: Get back on the bench press and hold the bar with an overhand grip, but this time make sure your hands are a fist-width away from each other. Do presses with this grip. This is a tough one but it builds triceps mass. Go ahead, try a pre-date workout this weekend. But remember, the aura lasts for just a couple of hours, so hurry.

-MUSCLES MANI

But something that's as interesting is the fact that 11 out of the 12 scientists are women; five of them are post-doctoral research scholars who have given up comfortable niches in the US to come back to India.

''The all-woman team was just coincidental. It probably goes to show that women are into biotech in a big way,'' says Harinder Singh Sikka, President (Corporate Relations), NPL.

''Certainly, the research infrastructure and scope for biotech is much larger in the US. But the desire to contribute my bit in an area, which could do wonders for the country, was greater,'' says Ghosh, who joined GeneQuest after her post-doctoral research in molecular biology from Harvard. Swati Patankar, 33, who works out of NPL's Mumbai centre, echoes that feeling: ''Having learnt and practiced the science at the most advanced institutes, I decided to employ the skills for my country.''

This gels with NPL's brand of corporate patriotism. When Bangladeshi rangers killed 15 Indian border guards in May, the company closed the Delhi office-situated in Lajpat Nagar, right next door to the Bangladesh High Commission-for two days and put up a black flag.

When Patankar decided to leave the US in September last year, she was attracted by the kind of project and infrastructural support offered by NPL, which she says is on par with many US research labs. Her colleague, Leena Khare, 30, who also works out of the lab in Mumbai, agrees but says that it's still a huge struggle to work in India, where it is often a struggle to find relevant expertise.

''All these women come from very modest backgrounds and to come back to India, leaving all the material comforts, and begin working for a start-up project, couldn't have been as easy decision,'' says Sanjiv Martis, Business Manager, GeneQuest, and husband of Suparna Martis, another researcher based in Mumbai.

The Martises boss, Swati Piramal, made several trips to universities in the US to get the kind of people she wanted. ''We definitely wanted the best available talent for this ambitious project, but a vital quality that I saw in these girls was a deep sense of social responsibility,'' explains Piramal, Chief Scientific Officer, NPL, and the moving force behind GeneQuest.

It was on one such visit to her alma mater, the Harvard School of Public Health, that Piramal met Patankar, about to present her thesis on ''Genomedicine and Malaria''. One of Piramal's former teachers told her that Swati was the brightest student in the school and was keen to go back to India. ''I was determined to have her in my team, but had to wait for nearly one year before she could make up her mind,'' says Piramal.

Last year NPL entered into a nine-year ''knowledge collaboration'' with CSIR's Centre of Biochemical Technology in Delhi. The company will invest around Rs 1.40 crore in the next three years in the two GeneQuest labs in Mumbai and Delhi. Why the two labs? It's just easier to analyse ethnic variations.

NPL sees GeneQuest as a long-term investment: the knowledge base that it builds up will, in a few years, be used to manufacture genetically manufactured drugs. As Ghosh says: ''If we successfully find even one magic molecule, 200 million diabetes patients all over the world can be cured.'' At the end of the day, that's what it's all about: making that difference.

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