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

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".