Attracting biosuppliers
Besides pharmaceuticals industry, the biosupplier industry too has not lagged behind in its zeal for collaborative efforts. A well known Japanese supplier, Shimadzu, has set up its direct presence in India in 2006 by establishing Shimadzu Analytical India, as a subsidiary of Shimadzu Asia Pacific, Singapore. The company has tied up with many Indian distributors to supply its broad range of analytical products mainly chromatography and measurement instruments.

The recent example in this vertical is that of a joint venture "DSS Takara Bio India" established between India-based DSS Imagetech and Japanese company Takara Bio, that came into effect in April 2011. With the capital investment of $1 million and 25 employees, the DSS Takara Bio India has been engaged in the manufacturing and sales of research reagents and kits. Dr Ushakar Nag, director, DSS Takara Bio believes that they are bringing to India world-class Japanese manufacturing technology of high-end molecular biology reagents thereby giving a competitive edge to Indian biological research.
Another Japan-based leading manufacturer of automated nucleic acid extraction systems and supplies, PSS Bio, recently had a technical collaboration with Mumbai-based Biotron Healthcare.

The partnership will produce magnetic-based nucleic acid extraction kits, which is expected to reduce the cost of extraction. Mr Hideji Tajima, president, PSS Bio, Japan in an earlier interview with BioSpectrum reiterated that the company is hoping to start the evaluation of fully-automated genetic diagnostics systems in India.

Growing research relationship
Chennai-based Indo-Japanese joint venture, Nichi-In Centre for Regenerative Medicine (NCRM), has in the past 10 years brought together the Indian and Japanese technologies and institutes to accomplish several significant contributions in the field of regenerative medicine/biotechnology. The autologous immune enhancement therapy, which has been in clinical practice in Japan, since 1990s has been brought to India by the NCRM.

Dr Samuel JK Abraham, director, NCRM says, "To my knowledge, the natural killer (NK) cell and cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) based immunotherapy has been provided only by NCRM in India, since 2011 and this was accomplished by the technology fetched from Japan and also the constant interaction of personnel between the two countries. Japan has the advantages of several state-of-the-art technologies in lab chemicals, reagents including cell culture scaffolds and nanomaterials. In India, we have young talents and wide spectrum of clinical diseases which are rare in the West and in Japan and so both the countries will benefit by a collaboration as accomplished by NCRM."