Our industry’s leading lights are all set to make their presence felt on a global scale in a few weeks at the India Pavilion set up by ABLE @ Bio San Diego from June 3 to 6, 2024. ABLE team is leaving no stone unturned to ensure an easy passage to 30 key players from the country’s biotech ecosystem, including governments, vaccine and therapeutics manufacturers, bio incubators, research centres, startups. They will show case the best, India’s biotech has to offer to the world at the world’s largest biotech event next week.

The ongoing busy election season has not come in the way of hectic activities in the Biotech industry. While policy initiatives are on hold, regulatory and other related issues have been attended to by government agencies across the country in recent weeks. One of the most important meeting was chaired by the Drug Controller General of India, Dr Rajeev Singh Raghuvanshi on April 26 when he had a 2-hour interaction with 130+ industry representatives on the new guidance documents prepared for streamlining the functioning of Subject Expert Committees (SECs) that appraise industry applications for medical product approvals.  ABLE has submitted a detailed set of recommendations to further streamline the working of SECs. The DCGI has promised to look into all suggestions from the industry. This was a very fruitful meeting and the DCGI’s patient listening to every suggestion was highly professional and praiseworthy. The industry looks forward to more such interactions on regulatory issues.

Technological change is a continuous activity in modern economy and our industry too has been adept at leveraging new technologies in every aspect, whether its research, manufacturing, processing, supply chain and so on. “We need to be ready for biotech’s ChatGPT movement,” argues Google former CEO, Dr Eric Schmidt, in a column reproduced here. He takes a futuristic look at the world from a biotech angle, where almost everything we use, whether cell and gene therapies to cure a range of diseases, food and meat we eat, fuels that run our vehicles, bioplastics that will wrap everything around and even concrete to build our homes will be of biotech origin.

Other few highlights of this edition of the newsletter are: Dr Vijay Chandru, former President of ABLE, talking about his interaction with the scholars at Harvard University’s Mittal Institute on the Climate verse project on health-related surveillance and epidemiology; Dr Deepanwita Chattopadhyay, ABLE Vice President’s detailed interview to Indian Express where she provides some great ideas to make India a Biomanufacturing Hub in the world. We also have extracts from the special Spotify podcast, Grow Everything Biotech, in which ABLE’s President of Council of Presidents, Dr P M Murali details the ground-breaking technologies from biotech combined with community driven initiatives are pushing the world towards a sustainable development path.

The newsletter captures the highlights of our recent webinars on funding opportunities at BIRAC, the potential for biotech companies from India in Canada’s New Brunswick and other major activities in which ABLE team was involved in the last few weeks.

Happy reading.