Action Biotech: Capitalizing in the Biotech Industry.

Capitalizing in the Biotech Industry

Action Biotech believes in the substantial future potential of stem cell treatments for many serious health conditions. They are venture capitalists who invest strategically in small companies that have promising stem cell capabilities.

Some of the Californian stem cell companies in which they have invested are beginning to show promising results in fields such as somatic cell nuclear transfer, or "personalized stem cell lines" which contain the personal DNA of the patient, thereby eliminating the body's normal immune system rejection, which is one of the limitations of current stem cell treatments.

However, they recognize that this field is a long road, with both progress and set-backs. They believe the field will move ahead more rapidly as the $3 billion from California's much-delayed "Prop 71" stem cell funding bill begins to become available to private companies from 2009 onwards.

Starting up a business in a highly contested field can be challenging. Many entrepreneurs are tempted to copy other businesses with the hope that their venture would manage to do better than the next fellow’s. Only a few have the courage to enter a crowded battlefield with a completely unique offering and change the rules of the game through innovation. One such firm is Acton Biotech (India), competing with thousands of diagnostic laboratories in the country, but making a singular proposition that has made prescribing doctors sit up and take notice.

It would be shocking, but not far from the truth, to know that there had been sick people who died because of inadequate diagnosis and wrongly targeted treatment. Dreaded diseases like cancer call for extreme treatments before which the body could wilt and collapse. So, it is essential to know exactly how much a patient could take before a process such as chemotherapy could be administered.

Modern research has shown that not everyone reacts to medicines the same way. There are people who metabolise the drugs too soon or too late, leading to complications. So, not only the dosage and frequency, even the nature of treatment must be customised to the extent possible.

It was with this objective Sandeep Saxena founded Acton Biotech. His laboratory in Pune and a network of sample collection centres help doctors leverage the power of gene analysis to design chemotherapy and related treatments for cancer patients. The 32-year-old biotechnologist believes a better understanding and use of human genetics could revolutionise the diagnostics business and alter forever the one-size-fits-all prescription that the medical world is used to while treating ailments.

Sandeep Saxena Founder and CEO, Acton Biotech

Asian Institute of Oncology in Mumbai is one of the institutions using Acton’s services. “So far, our practice was based on the assumption that all patients will respond to a drug in a similar manner,” Dr Anupama Borker, paediatric oncologist at the hospital, said. “But some patients would respond very differently from others. Now with these tests, we can stratify patients and tailor the drug according to so that it has maximum benefit and least side effects. We are also testing for the aggressive leukaemia and tumour load. If both these are high, the patient gets a stronger dose, as compared to a patient with a less aggressive leukaemia and low tumour load.”

Typically, a hospital refers a cancer patient to the nearest collection centre where a blood sample is collected. The genetic properties of the sample are analysed at Acton’s Pune lab. “Drugs for treatment of serious diseases like cancer are needed to be washed out of the body and if the patient lacks the required enzymes to wash it away, then it will start accumulating inside the body and prove counter-productive. Therefore, this is exactly why a simple gene test is so important as you can then be give drugs according to the enzymes you have in your system,” Mr Saxena said.

There are some global players in the field such as Mayo Clinic, Prometheus Lab and Quest Diagnostics, none of them is present in India, according to Saxena. Because of the novelty here, “even convincing my team that this project will work was quite difficult. But, now they are as confident about my business as I am,” he said.

“My business is a mix of biotechnology, medicine, pathology and marketing, and I am happy that I am able to maintain the correct balance between each of them. I want to expand it further and get into other major diseases like TB or AIDS. I am confident that very soon, everyone will be able to afford gene therapy and it will be done to cure even the most common diseases like common cold,” Mr Saxena said.

Article Resource:
The article appeared in The Economic Times, Mumbai in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".
Action Biotech

Ask Dr Shah: Your Homeopathic Medical Advisor

Homeopathy in Neighbourhood

IN Dr Rajesh Shah’s 5,000 sq ft clinic in Chembur, Mumbai, a team of nine doctors divide their time between treating visiting patients and chatting on the internet. Nowadays, they spend more and more time in front of the computer screen and their boss is not complaining. After all, they help run a global clinic in a combined offline-online format. And they’re winning more and more converts to their chosen practice, homeopathy.

Dr. Rajesh Shah, M.D.(Hom.) practices in Mumbai, India. He has studied homeopathy intensively for twenty years. Dr. Rajesh is an internationally acclaimed physician and teacher. Over the years he has conducted seminars and workshops for the practitioners and the students in England, Holland, Belgium, Czech Rep., Greece, Sweden, U.S.A., Ireland, Croatia, Norway, etc.

Dr. Shah has an uncommon strength of having a research base in his clinical environment. He has worked on many new therapeutic molecules; some of them have been granted Patents while some of them are international patent pending. He is a hardcore researcher + clinician + teacher + promoter of homeopathy.

Dr Shah presents a modern and scientific face of homeopathy. His huge practice supported by clinical research based data, statistics and scientific documentation, makes it unique in the homeopathic worked. He not only presents the 'new face' of modern homeopathy; but also responsible for 'new phase' in homeopathy. His global clinic in Mumbai is visited by patients from all over the world.

His team of nine full time doctors and other support staff not only offer the best of homeopathic treatment but rather set international standards in Good Homeopathic Medical Practice (GHMP).

Dr Shah has a distinction of having treated eminent patients from various faculties such as scientists, medical doctors, researchers, diplomats, ministers, film celebrities, professors, high profile government officers, etc. from many countries.

Homeopathy has become so popular in India that it is often considered part of its traditional medical systems. But the world over, while newer converts are being won every day, it is still in the backwaters of medical science, Dr Shah says. Even a few year ago, the awareness was very low. “Since my college days I felt very bad about the way homeopathy was not given its due respect as a mainstream medical form,” says Dr Shah, who used to distribute leaflets to popularise the discipline among his friends. “I felt it was my responsibility to make people aware of homeopathy so I saved from my pocket money to print those leaflets.”

It would be another decade before the dream started taking shape. In 1995, internet came to India and Dr Shah immediately knew he had the answer. He started learning nuances of the Web. He learnt web designing and content development. His only companion was his wife, Dr Rupal Shah, another homeopathic doctor. Next year, he launched his first web site Classical Homeopathy. It was an instant hit. People from all over the world sought advise online. Within a year, he started launching Web sites catering to specific disease complaints. Patients could get instant consultation, while the medicines would be shipped for a charge.

“It is a huge responsibility when patients come from abroad for treatment,” he says sitting at his clinic, while a colleague treats online a leucoderma patient from a Swedish village. “I feel compelled to cure him. I have the added responsibility to live up to his expectations. We can’t compromise on research and have to keep on discovering new medicines to enable faster cure,” he says. It has been 12 years since he took his homeopathy treatment online. He now runs 30 websites and treats from 152 countries. “My aim in life is to bring homeopathy to mainstream medicine and give it it’s due,” he smiles.

Article Resources:
Ask dr Shah
The Economic Times, Mumbai

Saving Lives On The Move

Saving Lives On The Move

Taking The Patient To Hospital Safely Is A Mission For Roy & Tripathi

FOR years, calling an ambulance in India has been a painful experience for those needing emergency care and their dear ones. An eternal wait would be followed by the visit of a rickety vehicle lacking much sophistication beyond a bed and siren. Apathetic drivers on the road would ignore the vehicle as they nudge ahead in traffic jams and the golden hour would often be lost before reaching the gates of the hospital. Death would be blamed on god and everything would be back to square one. And nobody did anything about it. Until two years ago.

Then, two engineers without any knowledge of automobiles gave up their engineering careers with German firm Dragger and started selling well-equipped ambulances, in which emergency treatment could be started as soon as the patient is taken aboard. It was a new concept and hard to sell initially. But with their relentless marketing, the duo have made hospitals see the value of treatment on the go and made their startup — Aeon Medical Services — a preferred name among healthcare institutions in the country.

Ranjan Roy and Abani Tripathi, the entrepreneurs, say most ambulances in India are merely passenger transport vehicles and are inefficient in the task of handling the first hour after an emergency. “In most ambulances, there is only an oxygen mask and few other equipment which are not enough to start point of care treatment by emergency response units,” Mr Roy says. Aeon, on the other hand, buys vehicles, imports equipment from Europe and builds integrated ambulances for intensive care, trauma and cardiac care applications. A patient being taken on one of these vehicles would be getting targeted, specialised emergency treatment even in the midst of a traffic bottleneck.

Ranjan Roy Founder, Aeon Medical Services

“Considering the traffic situation in a city like Mumbai or Delhi, if a patient has to go from Borivli to Asian Heart Institute in Bandra, it takes at least one hour. We fit our ambulances with specialised medical equipment such as cardiac revivers and other such type of equipment as is mostly found in ambulances abroad. What this does is that it allows the emergency medical personnel to start the treatment immediately thus improving chances for survival for the patient,” says Mr Roy.

Roy and Tripathi founded the company in late 2005, tapping into a market that was largely dominated by garage owners and local mechanics. “When we entered the market, more than 60% of the industry was unorganised. Doctors and hospitals that wanted specialised ambulances, had no choice but to go to a local auto body-builder to get their medical equipment fitted in the body of a vehicle mostly, a tempo or a large-ish jeep. Moreover, the garage owner would not have much knowledge about medical standards nor were they interested about what are the medical requirements are for an emergency response vehicle. Thus providing doctors with a shabbily made vehicle,” recalls Mr Roy.

Companies such as Tata Motors, Eicher and Bajaj Tempo do offer vehicles that can be converted into ambulances, but selling fully-appointed ambulances has never attracted them as a business. That’s where the two engineers found their opportunity. The medical fraternity was on the look for standardised vehicles matching the quality of those running in the advanced world. Tripathi and Roy used their European connection from Dragger and started sourcing equipment from Italy’s Spencer. “But this was not the tough part. Since both us have biomedical background, we knew where to look for medical equipment, but knowledge about the auto industry was as good as anybody else in the country,” Mr Roy says.

Undeterred, they decided to put up a fabrication unit in Pitampur, an automobile manufacturing hub. “The decision to have a facility in Pitampur proved to a good one in the long run, as we could then source our ambulance bodies from auto sector heavyweights like Tata Motors and Eicher,” Mr Roy adds.

Aeon has already bagged many high-profile customers. Wockhardt group accounted for nearly Rs 7.5 crore in its fiscal 2006-07 revenues. Aeon also services other clients like the Apollo Hospital in Calcutta and Satyam Group’s EMRI in Andhra Pradesh. But the ride for Aeon was not always smooth for Tripathi and Roy. “Getting the right people was a big problem for us. For not only did we need people with the right skill set, we needed them to shift lock stock and barrel to Pitampur,” says Mr Roy. They recruited garage mechanics from Kolkata, Mumbai and North India and trained them.

The customers, too, needed a lot convincing for buying their products due to cheaper competition from local vendors. “We had to convince our customers really hard to buy into our vehicles despite the higher price tag,” says Mr Roy. The local vendors were able to sell at nearly half their prices.

Surprisingly, money was never a problem for these two professionals. Friends chipped in to bolster the starting capital. Aeon was started with an investment of Rs 2 crore including an equity investment of Rs 8 lakh from the promoters, while the rest being in the form of loans from financial institutions and banks. The market for specialised ambulances and medical equipment is still nascent. Mr Roy says that the market for basic life support vehicles is around 500 per year priced at Rs 15 lakh per vehicle while that for advanced life support vehicles is also 500 vehicles per year but priced at Rs 20 lakh per car. Bulk of the business for Aeon now comes, not from hospitals but from emergency service providers like EMRI and Chikitsa.

Now Roy and Tripathi want to bring disaster management portfolio under Aeon’s wings. They are also looking to scale up their pan-India presence. They plan a joint venture with an European firm to trade in medical equipment in India. “We have now trained our guns on Mumbai’s disaster management cell and other such government units across the country. The 7/11 blasts in Mumbai and tsunami in South India have made government realise how important point of care treatment is during such incidents,” says Mr Roy.

Article Resource:
Author: Ritwik Donde is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

Healthy Business.

HEALTHY BUSINESS

Dippankar Halder, CEO, Spinach talks about the retail chain’s practice of hiring vendors and making them partners in the business’s growth.

Q: IS THE GLOBAL RETAIL FORMAT CONDUCIVE TO THE INDIA SCENARIO?

As a culture, the retail business in India has been flourishing for four thousand years. Commodities are bought and sold here in a certain way and we’re all used to that. The indigenous Indian retail format is much easier and better than firang models. Its not just about putting goods on a shelf, you need ongoing dialogue with the customer, humility and great domain knowledge.

Q: HOW DID THE IDEA OF HIRING PEOPLE FROM THE UNORGANISED SEGMENT AND ABSORBING THEM INTO YOUR BUSINESS COME ABOUT?

At the very inception, we thought that we could hire veterans from the unorganised food sector (fruit, vegetable and fish vendors), and transform them to heads of departments, since nothing can replace the warmth and familiarity of your neighbourhood vendor. But these vendors don’t have great communication skills or aren’t able to manage their environment well enough. So we have hired about a hundred local kiranawalas, trained them in billing, product knowledge, and soft skills and made them responsible for various roles such as distribution, quality control and front-end co-ordination.

Q: WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS?

From the beginning, outsiders raised many questions about the viability of this strategy; they raised questions about sales and customer acceptability issues. There were some integration troubles initially because of technology and documentation issues and emphasis on certain aspects of customer interaction. There was also resistance from the other employees as they were unsure as to how they would get along with the ex-vendors. But their passion and honesty helped alleviate problems and today our staff and the former vendors exchange knowledge and get along freely.

Q: HOW HAS THIS PRACTICE TRANSLATED INTO PROFITS FOR YOUR BUSINESS? DO YOU PLAN TO HIRE MORE VENDORS IN THE FUTURE?

Because the people we take in have extensive domain experience and on-ground experience, they are very good at their work. People like Sheikh Nadir Ali and Partha Mukherjee, who handle the fruits and vegetables and non-vegetarian categories respectively are invaluable to Spinach. And yes, we do plan to get in more people from the unorganised sector in the future.

Article Resource:
Author: Nikhil Menon is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

Banking on IT for Drug Discovery

Banking on IT for Drug Discovery

DISCOVERING India’s first ‘new medicine’ is perhaps the greatest dream of the country’s medical scientists. Leading Indian companies like Dr Reddy’s and Ranbaxy are yet to stun the world with an innovative medicine, despite a decade or more of research efforts. Their global success, so far, has come from copycat generic drugs. So then, why is Supreet Deshpande, who trained to be a mechanical engineer, sporting a happy smile?

For one, his radically different approach to the pharmaceutical industry has begun to pay off. Shunning the easy street to generic drugs business, that so many Indian companies have embraced, he started a purely research-based drug firm five years ago. His venture, VLife Sciences, has managed to discover 12 potential drugs, two of them entirely new and the remaining tweaked forms of existing drugs capable of treating diseases different from the ones initially targeted. And he hopes to take his first finished drug to the market within three or four years.

Mr Deshpande, a graduate from Bhopal University, stands out in his basic approach to business itself. His motto: The solution to a scientific problem may well be a non-scientific one. Says Mr Deshpande, “Look, I was never a scientist and I am not a scientist. But what I have realised in the course of the past five years is that a non-scientific perspective to a scientific problem is as important as a scientific perspective to a scientific problem... Common sense is more valuable than anything else, whether it is in farm equipment, technology or pharmaceuticals.”

Supreet Deshpande VLIFE SCIENCES TECHNOLOGIES

This difference in approach is evident as you walk into his research lab. There are no scientists in white robes, no one handling tubes with plastic gloves and masked faces, but a small team of people busy at their computers. Here, every scientific experiment is simulated on computers.

After several years with Bajaj Auto, Mr Deshpande joined Mahindra British Telecom in Pune in 2001, where he was responsible for exploring new growth opportunities for the company. “We had a small group of PhDs in science who were hibernating in that organisation, trying to develop software capabilities to implement complex algorithm. These guys were working in a corner and nobody paid any attention to them,” explains Mr Deshpande.

With their help, Mr Deshpande quickly identified pharma as an area where technology could play a significant role. “I was reading a lot of articles on the incapability of technology to deliver the desired results in the pharma sector... And the thing that did the trick for me was a significant lack of common sense while employing technologies in the pharma sector... Any decision was so much driven by science, that sometime people forgot why they are doing sciences. Is it for building more knowledge or for building an application that is beneficial to the patient?”

But he says Mahindra British Telecom did not share his enthusiasm about the project. He left the company, and decided to take his project forward on his own. “When I moved out, I spent six months at home, creating a blue print of what technology interventions I would think logical from a non-scientist perspective into the pharmaceutical discovery process,” says Mr Deshpande.

In 2002, he created VLife Sciences Technologies Pvt. Ltd and invested all his savings into his new company. At that time, his friend Atul Aslekar, a trained engineer then working in Japan, joined Mr Deshpande, adding his savings to the company’s initial capital. Initially, Mr Deshpande’s idea was to develop an algorithm that would enable pharma companies to use computer aided techniques to design new molecules. While pharma companies around the world already use similar software for a part of their research, Mr Deshpande’s ambition was to develop a software that would give him results so close to reality, that it alone could relied on, to identify potential candidates.

“This allows a lot of speed, in a day you can make hundred thousand molecules, which is not possible in a lab,” says Mr Deshpande. Once the molecule has been designed on the computer, it is chemically synthesised and tested on animals. “If that data is initially what we had expected, we go further, but if it is not then we study experimental results and go back improve its design,” explains Mr Deshpande. The software was then sold to several academic institutions, including IITs.

In 2005, the company started its own research programme. In two years, the company was able to come up with 12 potential drugs. Out of these 12 drugs, 10 are actually existing drugs, but that no one thought to use to treat a different disease, like its diabetic wound candidate, expected to enter the first phase of clinical trials on humans shortly.

In April 2006 Kotak Mahindra private equity fund invested in the company. Though the amount of the investment was not disclosed, then Vlife Sciences was valued at around $5 million.

Last month, the company was reorganised into two separate companies. VLife Sciences spun off its research division into a wholly owned subsidiary, NovaLead Pharma.

The company has focused its research effort on very specific areas. “We have thought it differently,” says Mr Deshpande. At a time when new drug applications are under increasing scrutiny from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NovaLead is working on drugs for which the FDA provides ‘fast-track approvals’ and a limited amount of clinical trials are required. To qualify, these drugs must be effective in the treatment of either rare diseases, which are markets too small for large pharma companies to invest, or diseases where the existing treatments are not effective.

“We have spent only eight hundred thousands dollars to take our diabetic wound drug to the first phase of clinical trials,” says Mr Deshpande. The pre-clinical studies were conducted in Boston by Dr Krishna Menon, a doctor who has to his credit three drugs, including Eli Lilly’s cancer drug Gemzar. (Incidentally he is also on the board of the company). The company is confident of taking the drug to market within three to four years.

Article Resource:

Author: Noemie Bisserbe is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

Health and care for all.

Health and care for all

THAT India’s primary healthcare is in dire straits is well known. While the affluent sections are being overwhelmed with the choice of superspeciality service, there is a widely held belief that there is no money to be made in providing healthcare to the bottom of the pyramid. Some entrepreneurs are challenging this as a myth and trying to improve the health of healthcare in India.

Ziqitza Health Care Services, the company behind the 1298 emergency ambulance service in Mumbai, has shown the way that it is viable to provide services at a subsidy or for free. Anyone can avail of their dial-in ambulance service, and the company has made it clear that ability to pay will not be a defining factor for using the services.

It was a few years ago that five individuals decided to junk their corporate careers to start the company. Shaffi Mather, Manish Sacheti, Ravi Krishna, Naresh Jain and subsequently Shweta Mangal came together in 2002 to begin Ziqitza.

The first four knew each other from their studies in the US in the mid-90s. Says Mr Sacheti: “We had all decided that we should go back to India and do something in healthcare.” Shaffi Mather and Manish Sacheti met during their MBA at University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business, and quit their respective jobs with Reliance Industries and The Aditya Birla Group. Naresh Jain, who graduated with an MBA from University of Maryland, College Park left GE Plastics and along with Ravi Krishna formed the core team.

The statistics they found were startling. Just 6% of all people in India have access to ambulances with emergency services, which meant that there were several individuals that perhaps lost their lives just en route to hospitals. The point was further driven home when Shaffi Mather’s brother nearly lost his life as a result of poor medical services. Says Mr Sacheti: “Having come from the US and observed the way the health care system works there, we definitely felt that we could do something in India.”

They swung into action by 2003. Shaffi Mather, the CEO of Ziqitza, had worked with the London Ambulance Service as part of a threemonth training at LSE. This proved to be handy as Ziqitza and London Ambulance Service entered into a tie-up in India for paramedic training. Mr Sacheti says: “They even offered us an ambulance, but we refused.”

They then studied the ambulance service in Hong Kong and a subscriptionbased service in South America, but junked the latter because it wouldn’t work in a system where people just couldn’t afford to pay. Finally, they decided to settle down on a ‘sliding scale’ model of payment. In effect, people that could pay would be charged higher, while those that couldn’t were subsidised. But all callers would be able to use the 1298 service regardless. The five-member management team decided to divide the calls into two categories, cardiac calls and basic calls. Says Mr Sacheti, “The cardiac calls require medical intervention. So an ambulance for a cardiac call requires a doctor, a ward boy and medical equipment.” The basic calls won’t require the bells and whistles that a cardiac ambulance requires.

Although their initial studies suggested that the service would be profitable at Rs 5,000 per call, Ziqitza priced its services at Rs 1,500 for a cardiac call and Rs 750 for a basic call for the first 20 km. Mr Sacheti says: “We have discovered that it’s a sustainable business model even at this price.” In a sense, the ambulances break-even, but the company has got four sponsors, Tata AIG, HP, SBI and Playwin that keep the corporate office running. Curiously, it’s been the more affluent bunch that haggles with the ambulance operators when it comes to payment, whereas several lower-income patients from areas like Dharavi have paid up to Rs 1,000 without any hesitation.

The 1298 service was formally launched in 2005 in Mumbai by the Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Ziqitza scaled up their ambulances from one to ten, and established a network of another 10 ambulances and omnis. As Mr Sacheti says: “We needed to have an ambulance for anyone that wanted the service and we can’t refuse calls. So we need to have other ambulances that will take up the load.” But Ziqitza makes it a point not to outsource the cardiac calls. On average, the service gets nearly 40-50 calls a day. But the service suffered some initial pangs. According to Mr Sacheti, “We would let the doctor decide whether the patient should be subsidised or not, but we found that the doctors were actually overcharging the patients and keeping the difference.” Now, all calls are screened. If they’re from the government or BMC hospitals, the fee is immediately waived off or cut.

Recently, Acumen, a not-for-profit equity fund, invested $1.5 million in Ziqitza to aid its expansion from 10 to 70 cardiac ambulances in Mumbai alone. The 1298 service will make its debut in Kerala as well by December. Mr Sacheti says that merely providing the service won’t be enough, it has to be world-class. Hence, the next target — get the patient to the hospital within seven-nine minutes of the call.

That would, perhaps, be the Formula One of emergency healthcare.

Article Resource:
Author: Irshad Daftari is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

A Doctor’s Journey from Pain to entrepreneurship.

A doctor’s journey from pain to entrepreneurship

Dr Patil Uses Acupuncture To Cure His Migraine And Set Up A Flourishing Business

IT WAS 1966 and 26-year Ratnakant Patil had to leave his examination hall. A severe headache made his final-year MBBS exam at the Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore a nightmare. He had a severe migraine attack and was vomiting. His sympathetic professors, who had been treating him over the previous few years, let him wait out this bout at the back of the hall. When he felt better a few hours later, they let him finish his paper in an empty hall.

Little did they realise that a couple of decades later, this experience would push Dr Patil to start his own business of curing people, just with a set of pins and needles.

Stress had kick-started the migraine, and for a while, the young Patil thought it was incurable. He had never met a doctor who could help him. Then, he decided to help himself. “Allopathy has no cure for these migraines. They can only give you pain killers,” says Dr Patil, who today heads a busy acupuncture clinic in Bangalore specialising in cures for pains and aches.


In the early seventies, while working in Denmark as a gynaecologist, he began to read about the benefits of acupuncture. He didn’t really believe in the benefits of some pinsand-needles therapy. However, all this changed when he and his fellow doctors at the Copenhagen City Hospital began to lose patients to the Swedish and Norwegian hospitals, which offered acupuncture. He went up to the hospital administration and suggested that they allow him to study the technique and bring these skills to the hospital to help retain patients.

Today, the soft-spoken doctor admits that his primary reason was to find a cure for his own affliction. Since he opened his own clinic in 1982, he has had the satisfaction of helping several victims of migraine, among other chronic aches and pains. He does acupuncture for pain management and practices from Kampo Clinic on Cunningham Road, in Bangalore. The word ‘kampo’ means ‘healing’ in Japanese.

He first worked from a rented room from the same location. As soon as he opened his doors, he says he saw an immediate surge of patients, who wanted to benefit from this ancient Chinese treatment.

“All these people had read about acupuncture and were readily willing to try it out,” he says. He used to treat 10 to 15 patients a day and charged them a fee of Rs 50 per sitting. Soon, he had to build his own clinic and hike the fee to up to Rs 75 per sitting. Interestingly, the cost of the treatment was Rs 100 until 2003. In the past five years, his fee has climbed five-fold and he still doesn’t treat more than 15 patients a day.

Over the years, Dr Patil has added to the services that he offers. These include multiple-Chinese needle treatment, the Japanese single-needle Royodarku method and Depo-acupuncture, where a needle stays in the patient for three days. He has combined these with modern machinery to offer sono-puncture-ultra sonic sound waves.

His latest addition came two years ago in the form of his Sonotron machine. This machine emits radio frequency waves and is described as a “totally non-invasive alternative medical therapy for patients with chronic and acute pain in their joints, and other soft tissues, without needing to use drugs.”

Article Resource:
Author: Jacob Cherian is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

Crossing the Rubicon and tapping into a Niche Drug Delivery System

RUBICON is the Italian word for Rubico, the Latin name of a small river in Northern Italy. To protect the republic from internal military threat, the Roman law forbade any general with a standing army, from crossing that river, as it formed a boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul and the Roman heartland. When Julius Caesar crossed the river in 49 BC, supposedly on January 10 of the Roman calendar, in pursuit of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, thus breaking the law and making armed conflict inevitable, he uttered the famous phrase ‘the die is cast’. Today, the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ refers to a person committing himself irrevocably to a risky course of action.

And that’s what three scientists committed to, when they set up Rubicon Research in Mumbai in 1999. With no personal fortune or company backing, Maharukh Rustomjee, Sudhir Pilgaonkar and Pratibha Pilgaonkar decided to set up a research company, with a mission to provide formulation development services to global pharma companies.

In a country filled with generic drug makers and bulk contractors, Rubicon has developed novel drug delivery systems that could be used by innovator companies in the West to make their patented drugs in newer formats. “We saw a great need for contract research in the formulation area, and one has to have the innovative skill sets, competency and be cost effective to compete,” said Ms Rustomjee.

The company started as a contract research organisation providing generic formulation development services to Indian and European companies. “We developed non-infringing processes for various generic products, stability data and worked on technology transfers,” she said.

Maharukh Rustomjee

Founder and COO, Rubicon Research

Ms Rustomjee had already undertaken projects for international development while working with Novartis Enterprises and GlaxoSmithKline. Sudhir Pilgaonkar had over 30 years experience in manufacturing value-added speciality pharmaceutical products, and handled activities such as manpower management, production planning, inventory control, safety and cost reduction in production management.

Pratibha Pilgaonkar had worked with Sun Pharmaceutical Industrials as vice-president for product development, and added significant value to the team. But setting up Rubicon proved to be a challenge. “Recruiting people initially was very difficult and competition is tough,” she explains. “In the first two to three years, we spent a lot of time training people. Research is a way of thinking, it can’t be taught in a class room, it only comes with experience, while working on projects.”

Funding the venture was another problem. “We were three scientists, with no company backing and no personal fortune, so we needed bank loans to start operations,” she said. While the company soon started working on small projects, which provided funds to further scale up the business, Rustomjee realised that to add value to the company, they needed to work on their own technology. “In pharma research, unlike IT, scaling up operations is very difficult. Each project requires a different approach and a small dedicated and vibrant team,” she explains.

In 2003, Rubicon Research started working on new drug delivery platforms like extended release systems, orally disintegrated tablets and drug coating technologies. The same year, Rubicon Research received approval as a commercial R&D company from the government of India’s directorate of science and technology, and filed its first international patent.

“Today, Rubicon Research develops pharmaceutical and consumer products and licenses out technologies to improve the convenience, side-effect profile or the therapeutic efficacy of pharma company’s new and existing drugs,” said Rustomjee.

In 2005, it licensed out its first controlled release product to a US-based company. Along with its own technology, Rubicon started developing drug delivery technologies for the specific needs of its global pharma customers. “Pharma companies come to us with a problem relating to drug delivery that we help them solve. For sponsored projects, the IP rights remain with the pharma company,” she clarified. Rubicon now has a team of 120 people in Mumbai, including 80 scientists.

In a significant milestone for the company, in 2007, Kotak Mahindra Bank’s private equity fund picked up a stake in Rubicon Research. “This is a new business model,” said Alok Gupta, country head for life sciences and technology at Yes Bank. While there are companies similar to Rubicon in the Western world, like Penwest Pharmaceuticals, Ethypharm or Azopharma, few Indian companies are present in this segment, points out Ms Rustomjee.

Rubicon is still at a very ‘early stage company’, admits Rustomjee. But as big pharma struggles to keep its head above water while swimming from one blockbuster drug to another, incremental innovation may play a significant part in their R&D strategy. And as the number of new drug approvals in the US and in Europe decreases, the demand for technology that may improve existing drugs, may soar.

Article Resource:
Noemie Bisserbe is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".

Eliminating Health Risk to Profits.

Two Entrepreneurs Help Firms Implement Preventive Healthcare.

When billing is per hour, as it is the norm in the software services industry, every second counts. Good health among employees generally makes sound business sense, but more so in a people driven enterprise. Well, nothing much of a revelation here, but that was enough for Vipin Prasad and G Krishnamurthy to smell a new business opportunity. Employed in Toyota and Brand-Comm respectively, the duo considered leaving their jobs for a venture that would help companies, especially in the outsourcing sector, minimize health risk among their staff: “Why not ratchet up a preventive healthcare platform and sell it to corporates?”

That was in late 2004. Today, their start up, People Health, caters to fifteen companies counting among the world’s most popular IT, internet and BPO companies. “The most important asset for an IT company is its people. Employees are billable and no company can afford having them not showing up for work,” says Mr Prasad.

Most individuals react after falling ill and ignore preventive healthcare. When people start suffering from illness, it is often too late for a company to get them back on track and eliminate the loss of productivity. So, PeopleHeath seeks to create a company wide database of staff health that can be used to formulate a policy of prevention rather than reaction.

Says Mr Prasad about one of their endeavours: “We started a risk assessment programme in an IT company in Bangalore and found that out of the company’s thousand employees, seven hundred suffer from back problem. To address this problem, we implemented a series of sessions conducted by orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists. “While this may sound common, the potential loss in productivity is significant.

“Our programme has enabled one of our customers to actually save Rs 10 lakh. “ wellness and preventive health care programs can lower medical insurance premiums and improve employees productivity.

PeopleHealth started at Mr Prasad’s house in Koramangla in Bangalore in November 2004. For a while, Mr Prasad and Mr Krishnamurthy, who had met years before at Brand-Comm, where they had worked together, had been wanting to do something on their own.

They saw a great opportunity in healthcare. While it is well set to become India’s next trillion industry, there are still significant gaps in terms of delivering healthcare policy in the West.

Sitting at home, Mr Prasad and Mr Krishnamurthy developed a tool, ‘health track’ to assess the health risks associated to a company’s employees. The tool takes into account an array of information related to employees’ health, habits and lifestyle, gathered through medical tests and questionnaires.

To start with they established each and every employees’ individual health score card. Then a corporate health score card for the entire company. PeopleHealth designs a corporate health care policy. Based on the results, they gather a health calendar for the company that may include assistance programs, induction sessions, stress management courses and health plan utilizations.

Mr Prasad had successful stints in the media, automobile and healthcare sectors managing portfolios like business development, strategic planning, marketing communications and brand management. Prior to co-founding PeopleHealth, he worked with Japanese automobile giant Toyota, where he was he was responsible for planning and executing communication campaigns for all Toyota Brands in India. Mr Krishnamurthy joined Mudra Communications from campus in 1996, before shifting to Brand-Comm as Account Manager in 2000.

Finally, in March 2005, the company bagged its first customer, one of the world’s most popular consumer services and internet security brand. The company is also developing a program to encourage employees to take care of their health. They created a benefit card that makes one earn points for consulting any of the centres associated PeopleHealth. It helps one to track their medical expenditure and are awarded cash back irrespective of how they choose to make payment. The card also allows you to load a PeopleHealth program anytime, anywhere.

Krishnamurthy (L) with Prasad

Article Resource:
Noemie Bisserbe is the Chief Editor in the The Economic Times, Mumbai and the article appeared in one of their successful columns on Entrepreneurship/Start-ups called "Starship Enterprise".