That's the sequence, Watson!

Chitra Phadnis

THE mood is one of caution as far as bioinformatics is concerned. The beginning of the year saw hype building up around the fledgling industry as the next big gold rush for India.

But six months after the first bioinformatics seminar in the country, with the IT industry's lesson on hype fresh in mind, things are moving at a more sedate pace.

Industry expectations have been belied and the kind of outsourcing expected has not really happened. ``At least the first phase has not been upto expectations, maybe it needs more time,'' says Dr. Gautam Das, Chief Executive of Syngene, a Biocon group company, which is into bioinformatics as well as chem informatics.

There has been delay in the operations of the Institute of Bioinformatics proposed by the Karnataka Government's IT department. The course was scheduled to start in June this year but has been pushed back to later in the year.

``Bioinformatics saw a jump in market value, fuelled by the genome project,'' says Dr. Gayathri Sabharwal, Coordinator for the Institute of Bioinformatics. The sudden spurt in demand led to a global shortage of trained people, and salaries for bioinformaticians, reportedly four times as much as their IT counterparts.

In India, bioinformatics training institutes have already begun to mushroom. Bangalore and Hyderabad have around five private training institutes between them. However, the industry is sceptical about the quality of manpower these centres can supply because most of them have short-term courses offering basic skills, says Dr. Sabharwal. In all fairness to them she adds, ``We need to wait for a few months to see the outcome of it all.''

Even before the training programmes have taken off, rate wars have started among the institutes. Bigtec in Bangalore started a training programme primarily to fulfil its own mainline needs in bioinformatics. ``We plan to take people ourselves,'' says Dr. Nirmala Nair, Member-Technical, Bigtec.

Initially, Bigtec attracted a good response, but interest diluted after the launch of other courses at lower prices, Dr Nair observes. However, Bigtec is not competing because ``we need quality people,'' she says.

Bigtec, which should have just started its first batch, found help from the IISc for its course. The Institute of Bioinformatics is finding it difficult to get the right kind of people -- both faculty and students.

``Though we get an enormous number of e-mails from within the country, and some from outside, we are being very choosy about the kind of people we take,'' Dr. Sabharwal says.

Dr Sabharwal seems to have taken it up as a challenge to create bioinformaticians out of B.Sc and M.Sc graduates as well as BEs, for its 9-18 month-long course. ``There are two ways to generate people for the industry -- either take bio students and teach them IT or the other way round.''

The interest from engineers and IT professionals is still of a low order. Even the IT slowdown has not really managed to deflect student crowds towards bioinformatics, though a few of them have toyed with the idea.

Dr. Sabharwal puts it down to the lack of information. ``The attitude seems to be that I left biology long back, in the 8th or 9th Std, and I really don't know anything about it.''

While IT professionals are not thinking bioinformatics, some IT companies certainly are. Kshema Technologies, an IT solutions company with focus on telecom and finance, has set up a bioinformatics chair in the PES Institute of Engineering in Bangalore. It has also tied up with the BVB college in Dharwar to offer a course in bioinformatics.

The Kshema CEO, Anant Koppar, sees opportunity for Indian IT companies in the area, if not in bioinformatics itself, in an industry supporting the field. ``Today, there are small, haphazard IT packages for bioinformatics. There would be a need for software for simulation, processing, in biochemistry, chem informatics and so on and we are planning to provide that,'' he says.

Kshema started its biotech initiative about ten months ago and has recruited professionals with a life-science background for that. ``The way R&D is done will change, medical systems will change with people carrying gene cards to their doctors, and so on. If biotech is accepted socially, requirements for bioinformatics could go up,'' he says.

Then comes the note of warning that never seems to be far away when bioinformatics is being discussed. ``I don't think we should go overboard the way we did with IT. If we do, we will face the same kind of problems,'' says Koppar.

A comparison with IT seems to be the industry's undoing. For instance, even the pharma major Glaxo has only around 200 people involved in bioinformatics, and 3500 people in IT.

e4e, a technology holding company, would never fund a start-up which was a standalone bioinformatics company, says Subhash Reddy, Vice-President of e4e. Mainly because there are only some 17-odd pharma companies worldwide to sell to. (At the rate at which they are merging, there might be fewer than that as the years pass). Secondly, the legal issues about protection of IP would prevent outsourcing to India.

``I don't want to be pessimistic, just realistic,'' says Dr. Das. There is a lot of misinformation floating around, he feels. ``Nobody has bothered to ask who came up with the global demand figures. If there is a 20-year-old-someone, somewhere, making $120,000 out of bioinformatics, he must be a genius. Not everyone can manage to do that,'' he says. Estimates of demand for bioinformatics professionals range from 2,000 to one million.

As of today, there are around 80 biotech companies registered in India, of which around ten may be involved in bioinformatics, hazards the IT secretary's office which also deals with biotech.

Bioinformatics is too small a canvas for huge business at the moment, he feels. Outsourcing did not happen as expected because companies are not comfortable with the offshore model.

Dr. Das has had people telling him ``I cannot communicate with the IT guy next to me. How can I do that with someone 10,000 miles away?''

The offshore model is not likely to work for India, at least immediately. ``None of the companies in existence now are likely to become an Infosys over the next three years,'' he says. India could survive if it were to do products, but the scale of business in India is too small for that.

Syngene itself is into chem informatics, where the information involves chemical structures to help drug discovery rather than genomics. ``In silico development of drugs based on chemical information is a greater possibility and more immediate than drugs based on genomics which is still an uncertain area,'' he says.

Theoretically, there is great potential, but not much tangible business has come out of it.

Dr. Das thinks the industry should be given some more time. ``After all, IT came to India only ten years after it bloomed in the US,'' he points out. Reddy believes that biotech can give the kind of returns that IT never has. ``Look at Dr Reddy's Labs. Nothing in the IT industry can match its sale of a molecule to Novartis.''