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Candida Moraes
Tata Consultancy Services is expanding
its bouquet of products. Its recent foray into drug discovery
solutions has set it apart from its IT competitors
There is
a new breeze blowing through Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
This new breeze reiterates the company's belief that solutions
don't end but continue to evolve with needs, people and time.
The three-and-a-half-year-old life sciences R&D division
of TCS, a 35-member-strong team, is proof of this philosophy
with its recent foray into drug discovery solutions. TCS recently
struck a one million euro partnership deal with Italian firm
Congenia, a biotechnology company promoted by Italy's Genextra
SpA Group, to provide advanced fragment-based solutions for
drug discovery.
Commenting on the tie-up with Congenia,
Dr M. Vidyasagar, TCS executive vice president and head of
the company's advanced technology centre, said, "The
Congenia offering can be described as fragment-based drug
discovery and optimisation. The project is for TCS to develop
drug-like molecules (known in the trade as 'drug candidates')
that will 'bind' to a protein called P66 that occurs in the
human body and suppress its activity. P66 is associated with
ageing, so any drug that can suppress its activity can, in
principle, retard the ageing process."
Why did an IT company see the need
to venture into life sciences and drug discovery? Dr Vidyasagar
explains, "This is the first of many projects that we
hope to get in the area of drug discovery. It is clear that
biology is now as much of an information-based science as
it is an experiment-based science. Hence an IT company of
the future must have a presence in the life sciences. The
offering is of very high value, even if the quantum of actual
money to be made is small initially. So such projects will
serve to distinguish TCS from its competitors."
TCS is also very clear about how vital
it is for the company to be ahead of its competitors and how
beneficial it is to make this foray. The pharmaceutical sector
is worth around $600 billion per year, not far from the IT
sector which is worth around $900 billion per year. Moreover,
out of the IT sector, only about half ($450 billion) constitutes
the software market, and the services market is just about
20 per cent (about $100 billion). The annual R&D spending
in the pharmaceutical sector is around $40 billion. An IT
company can aspire to tap into not just the R&D spending
but also other areas such as electronic health record creation
and clinical trial management, among others. "It is clear
that there is ample scope for entering drug discovery and
drug development areas," says Dr Vidyasagar.
The company has other plans concerning
drug discovery. Besides the Congenia contract, it has several
projects under way for custom software development in the
diagnostics area as it feels that in the future diagnostics
will be at least as important as treatment.
Dr Vidyasagar also feels that there
is greater scope for IT in diagnostics. "During the past
two-and-a-half years, TCS has developed the state-of-the-art
software package 'Bio-Suite', which is versatile, portable
and well-engineered from the standpoint of adhering to software
quality and standards. A cluster-based version of Bio-Suite
and a database appliance are under development." He adds,
"We are applying our own methodologies to analyse the
genome of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum,
to find potential drug targets. All in all, the efforts of
TCS are aimed at offering to the community end-to-end integrated
solutions, either in the form of products or services or both."
Talking about future plans, Dr Vidyasagar
says that they are examining ways to integrate workflow, data
flow and analysis throughout the chain of drug discovery.
"The project is still not very mature," he clarifies,
but adds that the aim is to offer integrated end-to-end solutions
for all aspects of drug discovery.
Project
Congenia and P66
The ultimate objective of
Congenia is to deliver actual molecules, not just computer
programmes. For this purpose it is necessary to first
determine the three-dimensional shape of the target protein
P66 through crystallographic experiments. This will be
done by Altiora Ventures with some assistance from TCS
in the computational aspects. Once the 3-D structure is
determined, TCS will use its computational expertise,
including several modules from Bio-Suite to screen its
proprietary 'fragment library' to determine various fragments
that will bind to the target protein. It will then engage
a local contractor (to be chosen) to synthesise minute
quantities of these fragments, and then send these to
Israel.
Further experiments will be carried out in Israel to determine
the 3-D structure of the protein and fragment. Several
iterations will follow, whereby the division will determine
which set of fragments will bind best to the target. The
company will also predict the drug-like properties of
these fragments again using its computational skills.
Congenia will itself carry out 'cell-based assays' to
determine whether the computationally predicted properties
are borne out in reality. Several iterations will follow
before the project is finally complete.
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Uploaded on September
19, 2005
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