About Author: Praveen Gupta has led the evolution of Genomics space in India and built Premas Lifesciences’ Genomics business from scratch to 250+ crores. With over 28 years of marketing experience in life science and molecular diagnostic arena, Praveen has handled solutions for cell biology, proteomics, high-throughput screening and genomics. In his earlier roles, he has also been a part of teams at Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy’s lab, Life Technologies Inc, Biorad and DSS.
The fight against Covid pandemic has been led by the robust healthcare workforce that we have – doctors, nurses, paramedics etc. but the Biotechnology sector has provided the ammunition by developing vaccines, antivirals, diagnostic tests, and other technologies.
A lot of these developments can be attributed to the advancements in Genetic Engineering and Genomics based approaches. These have been well adopted by the Indian researchers across the entire spectrum of Life Sciences research – from enhancing our understanding of basic biology to complex diseases, from infectious diseases to cancer, from agriculture to poultry. Premas in partnership with Global leaders in Genomics like Illumina has been a catalyst to this journey by closely working with some pioneer institutes and thought leaders at Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB), University of Delhi, –Centre for Cellular And Molecular Biology (CCMB), Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), National Institute of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) to name a few. Of course, this journey has seen its share of challenges – capital considerations, technical expertise and challenges in data analysis. But these visionary institutes have been the early adopters and shown that Genomics can be deployed in India at scale with world class research mandates.
“Over the last few years, Genomics is increasingly becoming part of the clinical decision making”
India has witnessed some landmark projects which has shaped the uptake of Genomics in the country. These include Indian Cancer Genome Atlas (ICGA), Genome India Project, Genome Asia project and Genomics for Public Health in India (IndiGen) to name a few. To add to this, some of the most cutting-edge approaches in Genomics like Single Cell sequencing, Multi-omics, Optical Genome Mapping (OGM) are also being actively taken up by Indian researchers.
Interestingly, over the last few years, Genomics is increasingly becoming part of the clinical decision making. Today Genomics is empowering clinicians globally to understand the underlying mutations responsible for cancer – and eventually help them with the right treatment regimen – what we call Precision Medicine. India is not behind in adopting this trend and the evidence is that all the major government and private hospitals today are doing biomarker-based testing for a variety of indications.
Another interesting area where Genomics is helping to get the right answers is Reproductive Health. Genetic testing for women in reproductive age can help to assess their risk of being a carrier for genetic disorders. It is gradually being established as the choice of screening tool for expecting mothers.
We at Premas Life Sciences are committed to expedite the Indian research and Diagnostics landscape by harnessing the power of Genomics. Premas firmly believes that small and mid-throughput labs can also do Genomics in spite of their capex and manpower challenges. To work towards this vision, we have taken the advantage of multiplier effect and helped to establish multiple Service Providers across India – Clevergene, Supratech, Medgenome, Strand Life Sciences to name a few.
Genomic surveillance during the pandemic
There was great imperative for evidence-based public health interventions during the pandemic, which resulted in the formation of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) by Government of India to track the genomic variations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The NGS capability of the nation was further strengthened to provide insights about circulating and emerging variants which allowed better informed public health decision making. Owing to the strong network of NGS infrastructure, combined with the preparedness of our scientific community, we were able to take on this new challenge as well. We are proud to say that our team worked relentlessly to support these labs which were the torch-bearers of the Genomic Surveillance initiative in India.
Going forward, we foresee this sequencing capacity of the country to address other challenges in Public Health – like surveillance of other pathogens, monitoring of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and studying the drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculsosis among others.
“A significant number of these startups are committed towards developing Genomics-based solutions”
