President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam on Wednesday unveiled the Bio-Suite package, a comprehensive bio-informatics product, developed by TCS under the New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative sponsored by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

Bio-Suite is a state-of-the-art software package that caters to all aspects of computational biology from genomics to structure-based drug design. It incorporates the latest publicly known algorithms, as chosen by a panel of academic partners, and has been coded entirely by the TCS team, using the best software engineering practices.

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TCS chief executive officer S Ramadorai said the company has plans to market the Bio-Suite worldwide and mark its foray in the area of computational biology and post-genomic drug discovery.

The product can be used by academic and R&D institutions, small/medium biotechnology companies that would find it difficult to create their own in-house bio-informatics teams, and by large pharma companies.

Explaining that the Bio-Suite has been developed at the Advanced Technology Centre in Hyderabad over a period of two years by a team of about 35 to 40 persons, Ramadorai said that the product represented 70 to 80 person-years of effort. TCS owns the full commercial rights to Bio-Suite and it would pay a royalty to CSIR on its sales.  

Launching the product at a function in TCS Deccanpark at Madhapur on Wednesday evening, President Kalam suggested that the endeavour should be to use it for economic development and also position it in the international market. He expressed happiness that 18 academic and R&D institutions participated in this programme.

Pointing out that TCS has agreed to sell Bio-Suite to Indian academic and R&D agencies at a price to be mutually agreed upon with CSIR, he said that this price should be affordable to facilitate widespread adoption of Bio-Suite.

The president felt that launching of this product would put India on the global map in the knowledge area encompassing computational biology, post-genomic drug discovery and so on. The sale of Bio-Suite at competitive prices would enable the Indian students to be trained in bio-informatics and the Indian biotechnology industry to develop newer products at a fraction of the cost of imported software.

Based on the success of Bio-Suite project, the CSIR has given two more projects to TCS. One of these is to develop Bio-Cluster, a version of Bio-Suite that runs on Linux clusters. The other is to carry out an improved annotation of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium Falciparum.

"These are state-of-the-art software programmes very much needed for our biotechnology and health care community. I am confident that the TCS team will develop this software very fast and become a pioneer in this area, which will be a boon to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry," Dr Kalam said.

"The successful development of Bio-Suite highlights our understanding of biology as a self-sustaining dynamic equilibrium. Today, we are able to look objectively at the intricacies of living organisms. The next step forward would be to understand the controlling of it involving clinical research, " he said

"Endocrine system imbalances and autoimmune disorders will be interesting areas. Every cell or organ in a body is totally dependent on the rest of body. We should be working fast to integrate therapeutic processing into Bio-Suite," he added.