June 3, 2004
Source: Chronicle Pharmabiz
Avesthagen to assist pharma cos with reagents for drug discovery

Nandita Vijay, BangaloreK

Avestha Gengraine Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has chalked a concrete plane of action to assist pharma majors like Ranbaxy, Cipla, Suven Pharma and Glenmark in their development of biopharmaceuticals by providing newer methods of assaying compunds through cell-based systems by offering reagents.

With the current focus among Indian majors to enter the drug discovery, Avestha has begun to share its expertise with pharma companies who are actually specialists in chemistry about novel technique of assaying compunds. "We will help to transfix cells with GPCRs (C-Protein Coupled Receptors) or with cetain proteins that would easily bind into becoming a potential drug candidate", Dr. Villoo Morawal Patell, founder and CEO Avestha Gengraine Technologies Pvt. Ltd. told Chronicle Pharmabiz.

For pursuing drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies need to develop transgenic cell lines for development of certain genes. As a part of the discovery process, it is also mandatory to prove that there is an expression in the genes. "Scientists now need to create a communication between the different cells through chemical signaling. Avestha has the expertise to assist the pharmaceutical majors bu offering right reagents for the assays to aid cell binding," she stated.

The project to associate pharmaceutical cmpanies took off early this year and is gaining ground. Its is based on profitable revenue driven model. Under the terms of the sponsered research agreement, Avestha will focus on the research and product development all the way through trials, while the pharmaceutical companies will concentrate on scale up, marketing and distribution.

Avestha has the capacity and the technology-edge in the field and will contniue to make investments in such models. Its holding company Avestha Gengraine Technologies Pvt. Ltd has already spun of three companies: Avestha Research Pvt. Ltd. which is an RPO (research process outsourcing), Avesthagen Seed for Food is called 'AQUAS' and Avesthagen Foos for Medicine is known as Avesthagen Inc. in the US, she informed.

Both the RPO wing Avesthagen Research and Avesthagen Inc are in the process of raising $7.4 million $9 million respectively from strategic investors.

Someof the other promising and ongoing earlier research based alliances with AstraZeneca Research India in the drug discovery programme for tuberculosis and the collaborative initiative with BioMerieux, US based major in vivo infectious disease diagnostics, BioMerieux for development of a diagnostic chip for latent TB have been encouraging as far as result of research findings go.