| Growing Demand for Biotechnology and India Opportunity |
|
|
|
The global biotechnology market was $154 m in 2006, according to Datamonitor. This industry comprises biopharma, bioagri, bio-services, bio-industrial and bioinformatics, with bioinformatics constituting about 1.3% of the overall global biotech market. In 2003, of the 50 top selling drugs, 14% or 7 were biotech products. In 2006, total revenues from sales of all blockbuster drugs were $234 b and 23% of this were achieved by biologics. At this rate of evolution, biotech is surely poised to take a larger proportion of the blockbuster market. Bioinformatics has a wide range of applications even though it is a relatively new field. It has generated a lot of interest since its inception in the Human Genome Project (HGP) and has given new direction to different processes involved in handling biological information like recording, annotation, storage, analysis, and search and retrieval. Biological (molecular) information includes gene sequences, protein sequences and structures, genetic variations and cell activity. Pharmaceutical companies are under constant pressure to develop new blockbuster drugs to replace older ones that are going off patent. With costs to launch a new drug crossing $1 b and the number of drugs approved for commercial launch decreasing, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly looking at biotechnology to deliver results. Large traditional pharmaceutical companies currently account for about 65% of total R&D expenditure but have a share of less than one third of drugs in the pipeline. On the other hand, smaller biotech companies account for just 35% of total R&D spending, but account for almost two thirds of the total drugs in pipeline. With bioinformatics increasingly becoming the backbone of biotechnology research, the bioinformatics market is piggybacking on the investments made in drug discovery and development, and finds application in every stage of the pharmaceutical and biotech R&D process. India Opportunity The growing global demand for biotechnology products, India's rich biodiversity that drives its clinical trials industry, a strong base for pharmaceutical research and development and IT services, and well-educated low cost English speaking human capital is driving the offshoring of bioinformatics services to India. The bioinformatics outsourcing opportunity to Indian bioinformatics vendors will rise from $32 m to 2007 to $62 m by 2010. The key areas of opportunities for Indian bioinformatics vendors in markets such as US, Europe and Japan are in:
Global companies were earlier outsourcing only clinical research related services to India. The implementation of IPR in India from January 2005 is gradually bringing global companies to India also for discovery services involving sensitive data. Going forward, the wide variety of opportunities and their diverse nature will attract many new vendors, as well as encourage existing vendors to widen their service offerings. Indian vendors offer integrated bioinformatics solutions such as biological and chemical databases, data analysis, data mining, bio-medical text mining and customized tool development among others. Presently, majority of the bioinformatics revenues are derived separately from databases, services and software products. Hardly any vendor provides a complete enterprise IT solution. Driven by the need for integration of various databases/tools with R&D efforts, in the future, enterprise IT solutions should garner a larger share of the market. The above article is an excerpt from the joint publication by ValueNotes and KnowGenix: "Bioinformatics Outsourcing for Life Sciences: India Opportunity ". To read the Abstract and Table of Contents, please click here . |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
ValueNotes’ research indicates that the domestic BPO industry stands at an inflection point, with the growing scale of Indian buyers as well as the emergence of significant vendors with greater capabilities