“There is a huge gap in corporate engagement and government procurement of innovative products within Telangana”

According to the world’s leading real estate consulting firm, CNRE’s latest report, ‘Global Life Sciences Atlas’, Hyderabad has emerged as a prominent global centre of life sciences manufacturing activity in India. This positions Telangana to play a defining role in shaping the next decade of biotech innovation and entrepreneurship. In alignment with this development, Hyderabad-based Atal Incubation Centre (AIC), hosted in one of the premier research institutes, CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), seeks unique schemes and proposals from the government to strengthen biotech entrepreneurship in the state. Dr N. Madhusudhana Rao, Chief Executive Officer, AIC-CCMB, spoke with BioSpectrum India, highlighting the dynamic growth trajectory of the biotech innovation ecosystem in Telangana. Edited excerpts:

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How is AIC-CCMB contributing towards strengthening Telangana's position as a life sciences innovation hub of India? What are the challenges that lie ahead in this direction, particularly for the startups?

AIC-CCMB in the past several years has been standing top of the list of life science incubators locally and nationally by joining hands with larger stakeholders in the domain. Since COVID times, AIC-CCMB has created various avenues for startups and innovators in product development as well as validation. In particular, AIC-CCMB partnered with Telangana Innovation Cell (TGIC) & tHUB to engage two programmes, REGIG and Mission 10X (SIG), where several startups in life sciences and medtech have been engaged for mini-acceleration and micro-funding. Other than local strong partnerships and collaboration with fellow incubators and stakeholders, AIC-CCMB, along with tHUB is engaging the NHS Manchester ecosystem, TANDEM programme with German Centres for Research and Innovation (DWIH Germany) and other global ecosystems to strengthen the life sciences ecosystem as a whole for the state.

The major challenge lies in accelerating these life science startups with enough quantum of funding from both the government side and the private investment side. A match-making between such players is a greater challenge at the moment. Secondly, unique platforms for market access and regulatory support from the local Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) office would be greatly helpful to augment the technology development.