Table of Contents
THEME
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
(GS-3)
- Q National biopharma mission will help to strengthen biopharmaceutical industry in India. Comment
- India has been an active player in the pharmaceutical industry and has contributed globally towards making life saving drugs and low cost pharmaceutical products accessible and affordable for those in need.
- Be it the Rotavirus vaccine, heart valve prosthesis or affordable insulin, India has been a forerunner in these and many more.
- Despite, these advances Indian biopharmaceutical industry is still 10-15 years behind their counterparts in the developed countries and faces stiff competition from China, Korea and others.
- The aim of the Mission is to “Enable and nurture an ecosystem for preparing India’s technological and product development capabilities in biopharmaceuticals to a level that will be globally competitive over the next decade, and transform the health standards of India’s population through affordable product development”
- The lacuna primarily exists due to disconnected centers of excellence, less focus on translational research and staggered funding.
- need felt to focus on consolidated efforts to promote product discovery, translational research and early stage manufacturing in the country to ensure inclusive innovation
- It is an Industry-Academia Collaborative Mission for accelerating discovery research to early development for biopharmaceuticals.
- The World Bank assisted INNOVATE IN INDIA (i3) program under this mission aims to create an enabling ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship and indigenous manufacturing in the sector
- The focus of the mission is to:
- Develop new vaccines, bio-therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices to address the rising burden of diseases
- bring isolated centres of excellence (Academia) together, enhance regional capabilities and strengthen the current bioclusters network in terms of capacities as well as quantity and quality of output.
- deliver 6-10 new products in the next five years and create several dedicated facilities for next- generation skills.
- To develop platform technologies for product validation, link institutions to strengthen clinical trial networks, promote partial derisking for novel products, and build capacities in emerging areas such as bioethics, bioinformatics etc Q-What is earth bio genome project? Explain its significance in addressing issues like climate change and biodiversity conservation .
- It is an international consortium of scientists which will undertake the project that aims to sequence, catalogue, and characterize the genomes of every eukaryotic biodiversity on Earth over a period of 10 years to sequence 1.5 million species in three phases.
- There are about 8 million eukaryotic species and only 0.2% of eukaryotic genome have been sequenced so far which are still in the crudest form.
- However the EBP project will help to create a detailed genetic sequence and reveal evolutionary connections among genus, orders and families that will make up the Digital Library of life.
- EBP will address a wide range of issues which humanity faces such as climate change on biodiversity, conservation of endangered species and ecosystems and preservation and enhancement of ecosystem services.
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