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India's first bio-informatics product unveiled
By siliconindia staff writer
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Thursday, 15 July 2004, 19:30 IST
HYDERABAD: The President of India H.E. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam today unveiled `Bio-Suite,' a comprehensive state of the art bioinformatics product developed by Tata Consultancy Services, under the NMITLI program sponsored by CSIR. At a function held at Deccan Park, the technology development centre of TCS, the President handed over a plaque to S. Ramadorai, Chief Executive Officer, Tata Consultancy Services and Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, Director General, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). Bio-Suite is a state of the art software package that caters to all aspects of computational biology from genomics to drug design. It incorporates the latest publicly known algorithms and was entirely developed by the TCS team using the best software engineering practices. The domain knowledge for Bio-Suite was provided by eighteen "academic partners" who were identified and directly funded by CSIR. Bio-Suite is ideally suited for use by small & medium biotechnology companies, academic institutions, as well as by pharmaceutical companies.
Welcoming His Excellency Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam on the occasion, Ramadorai - CEO Tata Consultancy Services said "The unveiling of the Bio-Suite at the hands of the President and one of the best scientists in the country is a proud moment for us at TCS. The experience of developing this Bio-Suite with CSIR has been fulfilling. We are keenly looking forward to working with CSIR on developing more such pioneering products for the industry."
TCS plans to market the Bio-Suite worldwide and mark its foray in the broad area of computational biology, post-genomic drug discovery. TCS can provide value-added services on top of Bio-Suite. The Bio-Suite has been developed at the Advanced Technology Centre in Hyderabad, over a two-year period, by a team of roughly 35-40 persons, and thus represents about 70-80 person-years of effort. Bio-Suite complies fully with all the TCS quality control procedures and is among the first products from TCS aimed specifically at the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. CSIR has assigned all commercial rights to TCS to enable it to market the product as it thinks fit.
Bio-Suite was sponsored by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) under its NMITLI (New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative) program. Eighteen academic and R&D institutions in India received research grants and worked with TCS on the project. TCS owns the full commercial rights to Bio-Suite and will pay a royalty to CSIR on all sales. The other partners have received research grants in return for their participation.