Indian Bioinformatics Market To Touch $20 M By ’06: Report

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Mumbai: : The Indian bioinformatics market is estimated to grow to approximately $15-20 million in 2006, according to a recent report on the Bioinformatics sector by Avendus Advisors.

The report states that the worldwide bioinformatics market was pegged at $697 million in 2001 and projected to increase at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 20 per cent between 2001 to 2006, reaching an overall market size of $1.7 billion by 2006. Avendus believes that increasing data generation and analysis will drive this growth.

Avendus, an investment bank, focuses on IT services, IT-enabled services & technology, as well as high growth areas like fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals and the media.

Bioinformatics, explains the report, is the use of computer technology to store, organise, generate, retreive, analyse and share genomic, biological and chemical data to support the drug discovery process. And IT plays a crucial role in many aspects of genome research, from data acquisition and analysis to data management. India has the potential to become a key player in the bioinformatics market due to its large, trained pool of IT manpower.

According to Avendus, Indian companies can play a significant role in areas such as data handling, data-mining, genotyping and fingerprinting, DNA sequencing etc. The report estimates that currently up to 10 per cent of investment in R&D is IT-related, and hence there is huge potential for Indian biotech and IT companies to enter into collaborative bioinformatics research with global pharma majors in the near term.

The report, however, indicated that despite India’s IT capabilities, it may be difficuly to replicate this success in biotechnology as biotechnology differs from IT in many ways. Avendus suggests that Indian players will have to leverage upon the lower costs of infrastructure and human resources. The cost of setting up and running a bioinformatics company in India is a fraction of the cost in the US. India companies will have to target pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as agribiotech and industrial biotech companies.