INDIA CAN BE AN INNOVATION HUB

KG Ananthakrishnan

CAN WE BANK ON PLASMA THERAPY?

Shahid Jameel

STARTUPS SHOULD FOCUS ON TESTING KITS

Varaprasad Reddy

Sriram Natarajan

Experts who participated in a webinar on “Biotech To The Rescue” organised by Bennett University on Thursday were unanimous that India needs to ramp up testing to fight this pandemic better. But they also felt the country was a powerhouse of innovation and its scientific community aided by business could convert this crisis into an opportunity by becoming futureready.India should use the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity and emerge as an innovation hub, not just to tackle coronavirus, but for any future pandemic, KG Ananthakrishnan, director general, OPPI (Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India ), said.“We are coming together worldwide to find the solution. Scientific discussions are important and sooner we will have something coming out of research. Increasing Covid-19 test capabilities is really important. The scientific community is working together to develop and scale up diagnostics, as well as potential drugs.”“There are 67 vaccine candidates at preclinical stage, while at least three have moved to the human clinical trial stage, but a vaccine for the novel coronavirus is unlikely to be ready for mass use before 2021.”“We need to create an environment (where) innovation meets the unmet need during this crisis, by turning it into an opportunity. We can weather the storm. We have to see how we can convert this into an opportunity. India has extraordinary talent to unleash intellectual capability. Let us try to develop India as the future hub of research and technology.”“This (crisis) is a wake-up call for us to scale-up. If we can be the pharmacy of the world, then it’s a potential opportunity for us to become the best healthcare supplier. We should ramp up healthcare infrastructure — doctors, nurses and other manpower, where we are way behind. We also need a much bigger allocation in healthcare.”“India has the capability, the talent pool required to become a powerhouse of innovation… We need to focus on supporting, recognising and rewarding highrisk innovation research, strengthening industry-academia partnership and making available opportunities for investors to bring in investment for high-risk innovations.”“Every crisis is an opportunity. An opportunity to rectify the causes, improve responses and avoid it in future. I am sure this is what the Covid-19 crisis will teach us to do. Let us take this as a learning opportunity and make ourselves future-ready.”On plasma therapy as a treatment to Covid-19, Shahid Jameel, chief executive officer of Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliances, said it all depends on the availability of plasma and one which has a high titer, which is the presence and the amount of antibodies in the blood.“The situation right now is that people who are asymptomatic and those who have mild infection, don’t seem to be raising very high titer antibodies. I think plasma therapy is going to be a challenge. It will be restricted to people who have bad disease in hospital. I don’t think of it as a public health measure,” he said. Varaprasad Reddy , chairman, Shantha Biotechnics , said the situation on diagnostic testing in India is poor, as the country is testing only 160 people for one million population. Israel, on the other hand, is testing 18,000 people, Italy 17,000 and South Korea 10,000.“There is a lack of test kits and lack of preparedness. My appeal to the government is to import test kits. Locally, more startups should start developing them.” Sriram Natarajan , CEO, Molbio Diagnostics, Goa, said, “It’s easy to say that we should import kits. But foreign companies are too busy in their own countries. So, they don’t have enough kits to give to India. At the same time, lot of Indian companies are also getting into the picture but there’s a lot of capacity limitations. Probably in the next couple of weeks, we can see a lot more capacity coming from India and also some imports happening later. We should be able to take care of that.”