The Hon’ble Minister of Industries & Commerce, K T Rama Rao today announced establishment of a state-of-the-art B-HUB, which will have a scale-up manufacturing facility for biopharma based R&D at Genome Valley, Hyderabad. The announcement was made in Hyderabad post a detailed discussion today chaired by Hon’ble Minister in the presence of Principal Secretary, IT E&C Shri Jayesh Ranjan, TSIIC VC&MD ShriNarasimha Reddy and Director (Life Sciences & Pharma) Shri Shakthi Nagappan.
The proposed B-Hub facility, with an estimated project cost of INR 60 Crores, will be set up through Public Private Partnership in Genome Valleywhich is India’s first organized cluster for life sciences R&D and clean manufacturing activities. B-Hub will be a first of its kind initiative in the country, aimed at providing much needed support to the biopharma R&D activities featuring a scale-up manufacturing facility along with a turnkey incubator / labspace module at GLP grade within a built-up area of 40,000 Square Feet. Establishment of an end-to-end biopharma scale-up manufacturing facility will give domestic companies the required impetus viz-a-viz Korea, China and France who have taken lead in biopharma innovation. Companies that are in early stage clinical development but lack the requisite expertise and resources to navigate the complexities associated with business planning, cell line development, process development, technology, and/or regulatory and risk assessment, would leverage B-Hub facility to help break down roadblocks and improve the likelihood of commercial success.
Hon’ble Minister Shri K T Rama Rao said, “With Indian companies aggressively embarking on the global biosimilars opportunity, a Biopharma scale-up facility will help them leapfrog in their endeavor, while reducing the time to market. Inadequacy of scale-up infrastructure and funding is pushing cream of biopharma ventures to re-domicile themselves in different parts of the world. Hyderabad being the Life Sciences capital of the Country, we have taken the lead by conceptualizing B-Hub, a biopharma scale-up lab with separate areas for cell-line development, media screening, clone selection, upstream and downstream process development and small-scale production (100L) for pre-clinical studies.”
The “Genome Valley is a very unique cluster and the kind of cutting edge scientific efforts happening in Genome Valley is just unmatchable by any other cluster in India and perhaps Asia. With over 200 companies, Genome Valley is home to companies with varied capabilities. Genome Valley is also the most active cluster in the country with over 200 organizations including two major vaccine manufacturers with WHO-Prequalified vaccines for global supply. Given the rich mix of global and multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, I believe Genome Valley is well positioned to host such a common scale-up manufacturing facility. There is a significant demand of such facility that will reduce the time to market for our Companies and single-use set-up ensures adherence to world class regulatory norms” he added.
The Hyderabad, in recent times, has emerged as a major scientific and R&D hub for Pharma and Life Sciences sector. It is rightly recognized as the Vaccine Hub of India and the world, producing about 33% of global vaccines dosages. The State Government has set has set out an ambitious vision for the sector, through leveraging the existing strengths to create additional 4,00,000 jobs with targeted investment of USD 100 Billion over next 10 years. Government has launched various initiatives including Genome Valley 2.0 Hyderabad Pharma City, Medical Devices Park, Life sciences Profiling, support for incubators, Life Sciences infrastructure fund, and BioAsia to supplement the support required for this ambitious endeavour.
