Sun launches centre of excellence in Hyderabad

Wednesday, 11 February 2004, 20:30 IST
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HYDERABAD: US biotech giant Sun Microsystems Inc. Wednesday launched a centre of excellence in medical bio-informatics in this south Indian city. A memorandum of understanding was signed by top officials of Sun, the Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) and the Andhra Pradesh government. The $5-million project is being hailed as the first of its kind in medical bio-informatics in India and Sun's ninth centre of excellence in the world. The institution is expected to network centres of excellence in medical bio-informatics, create a large databank, open new vistas in research on genetic disorders and help in the development of new drugs. Andrew Lim, Sun's director for South Asia of global education and research, Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain, director of CDFD, and B.P. Acharya, secretary at the department of industries in the state government, signed the agreement. Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research at Sun, said that the Sun centre of excellence at CDFD would create one of the world's largest databases on genetic disorders in India. "It is going to help society in the long run. Making this data available at the fingertips of scientists and researchers is going to allow them to come out with new discoveries," Jones said. "As it gets down to doctors, it will allow them to diagnose things more quickly and mitigate genetic disorders," she added. She said Sun's centre of excellence programme was based on partnering with a university or research institution in an industry like life sciences, bio-informatics, medicine, telecom, oil and gas. "Sun today has 80 centres of excellence spread all over the world." The Sun centre of excellence in Hyderabad will be modelled on the lines of similar centres of the firm in Beijing and Singapore. "It would be of great help in terms of networking, grid computing in bio informatics, research and development and exchange of information," said state government official Acharya. Hasnain of CDFD said the launching of the centre of excellence marked a quantum jump for CDFD. "The major focus at the centre would be on medical and clinical informatics. The biggest advantage of this would be that we will be able to put together, computerise and analyse India's health statistics and data and use that to prioritise things to be done in the health sector. "On that basis, we would be in a position to say what should be the forecast and which would be the disease of interest to us, where the diagnostics should concentrate on and in which areas we need vaccines." Hasnain said CDFD was already working on finding a solution to genetic disorders. "Thanks to this centre, we would be able to do similar work on genetic disorders at the national and international level."
Source: IANS
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