Winners announced for the Biotech Idea to Innovation Awards

In September 2006, with an aim to encourage young Indian researchers and to expose them to the UK’s strength in innovative biotech research, British Council India had initiated a unique ‘Idea to Innovation’ programme in the field of biotechnology and biomedical research. Under this programme, bright innovative proposals in the broad category of Diagnostics/Therapeutics/ Vaccines/Drug Delivery system/ bio device having applications in human and animal healthcare were invited. Three young researchers were selected by an expert jury for the Biotech Idea to Innovation Award which comprise of a citation and a grant of £1500 to visit labs of their counterpart young scientists in the UK and take forward the research idea.

The winners are:

Sudipta Saha, Senior Research Fellow, Indian Institute of Chemical Biology: She will be researching measurement and analysis of vertical motility of spermatozoa with special reference to vertical velocity.

Indrani Banerjee, Research Officer, Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences, Christian Medical College: She will research the efficacy of VP2/6/7 rotavirus like particles constructed using genes from commonly circulating human rotavirus strains in protection against rotavirus infection.

Umakant Gupta, Research Assistant, Lipid Research Section, Formulation Development (NDDS), SunPharma Advanced Research Center: He will research Liposomes for peptide delivery.

Apart from the three awards, a special mention Jury award was won by Amitabh Gupta, B.Tech student at the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology in Noida for his proposal on Application of artificial neural network and evolutionary immuno-informatics for vaccine design.

The jury comprised Dr VK Vinayak, President-R&D Panacea Biotech Ltd (Former Senior Advisor, Department of Biotechnology); Dr T Madan Mohan Advisor-Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science & Technology; Dr Gautam Ghosh Head, Lifesciences National Research Development Corporation (NRDC)

The Awards will be presented at the Biotech Idea to Innovation Seminar on 19 February 2007.

Biotech Idea to Innovation Seminar 19 February 2007

Sir Gregory Winter CBE, FRS, will deliver the keynote address at this seminar. He is the Head of the Division of Protein & Nucleic Acid Chemistry-Biotechnology at the UK MRC Lab of Molecular Biology. One of the pioneers of protein and antibody engineering, his prolific work includes the invention of humanised and fully human antibody technologies (most therapeutic antibodies on the market utilise his inventions). He has also co-founded two antibody biotech start-ups – Cambridge Antibody Technology and Domantis. Participants will get an opportunity to interact with key UK and Indian experts and gain insight into the process of innovation. For more information and registration for the seminar contact Apurva Chaturvedi at apurva.chaturvedi@in.britishcouncil.org