Author Archives: Samuel JK Abraham

Tokyo to Bangalore

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In the late 1980s to early ’90s it was the information technology (IT) companies from Silicon Valley of USA who moved to Bangalore, and now the University of Tokyo, the oldest of Japanese varsities with several Nobel laureates to its credit, has opened its office in the city of Bangalore, which is nicknamed the Silicon Valley of India.

The actions of Silicon Valley and the University of Tokyo have a common impetus: young talent of India. As I interacted with the Director of Indian Office at the University of Tokyo, Mr. Hoshino, he revealed that the problems plaguing Japan are decreasing population and a declining of interest among its youth for science as a career, which he says is worrisome. With this Bangalore liaison office, he is confident that the well-equipped Japanese universities and laboratories could be a worthy platform for Indian students to get trained, as well as internships and training in India for young Japanese graduates. An interaction between industry and academia is also a goal of the University of Tokyo’s move to Bangalore, he insisted.

The calls to mine the scenario in 1993 when I first landed in Japan, when, except for the Tokyo metropolitan area, the signs in railway stations were in Japanese only.  That has now changed, and the University of Tokyo is also starting to offer programs in English, which will remove the language barrier, enabling Indian students to come to Japan for higher studies and research careers in science.

No doubt, this initiative will be a win-win for both countries: Japanese technology should add value to the Indian talents, and the diverse, big market of India, with its knowledge base should be an ideal platform for the Japanese institutes.

I will not be surprised if a university from India opens an office in Tokyo to lure the Japanese graduates with what India has to offer!

Blog post and artwork by Samuel JK Abraham

Panama’s East-West Duo

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The Republic of Panama, a country which connects the world by disconnecting itself, is all set to become a biotech niche. This is in part due to the charismatic duo Dr. Ruben Berrocal, educated in the West (USA), and Dr. Jagannatha Rao, hailing from the East (India). These two have ambitious plans to make the country a knowledge and science hub.

During my visit in April 2012, I entered a building that was former housing for the US Army, but now converted into a lab of INDICASAT (Institute for Scientific Research and Technology Services), with more than 30 scientists working on various exciting projects, including a new strategy to control malaria using funding from the Bill Gates Foundation. Heading this institute, Rao was proud to tell me he had brought the first PhD programme to Panama, with recognition from a national university in India. One of the first PhD scholars was Berrocal, the minister for science and technology of Panama.

In his office overlooking the Gulf of Panama, Berrocal, who is a US board-certified anesthesiologist, shared with me his vision on making Panama a knowledge-hub of Americas. “I want to complete a PhD first, and that experience, I hope, would impart me with values I can share with my team to help them achieve our goal,” he said. He explained how he’s trying to bring the best brains from all over the world to Panama, setting up infrastructure and facilities, allowing for research on a wide area of life sciences and materials sciences.  He’d also like to restructure the primary education systems of the country with the help of experts.

The Panama Canal, through which millions of passengers and goods pass as they move from the Pacific and the Atlantic, has a history of immigrants since the early 20th century when work on the canal started. The multi-ethnic population is an advantage, says Rao, who has made the number of publications from his institute grow 10-fold and is overseeing the construction of a $50 million new facility, namely Panamanian Research Institute of Science and Medicine (PRISM), which will house five research centers.

Rao and Berrocal are helping build the Panama Biodiversity Research Centre under INDICASAT in Coiba Island, which is a UNESCO-recognized, virgin biodiversity area. They are also planning to develop Biotech Park, which will house both biotech research units and industry.  Both initiatives are firsts in Panama.

Berrocal points out that “ours is a small country of 3 million, with natural resources plenty and good weather all through the year. So this is a suitable environment for brilliant minds to settle peacefully, think creatively, innovate and thereby contribute to science and therefore the society.”

When I came home to Japan, I found a communication waiting from them, proposing Japanese and Indian institutes work together on a new project.

Blog post and artwork by Samuel JK Abraham

Multipotent scientists survive in tough times

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It’s not always sunny for start-ups in healthcare biotech. And when the weather gets bad, one should either go dormant or find places with the right climate.  We can learn this lesson from Prof. Yuichi Mori and Dr. Hiroshi Yoshioka, the polymer-biology duo from Waseda University, Japan.

When Yuichi Mori set up his lab for polymerization-related work in Tokyo, his only asset was a knowledge of monomers and their polymerization. He was able to secure help from another technocrat, Hiroshi Yoshioka, who had several ideas on polymerization, based on certain algorithms that worked paradoxically, like the hydrogen-oxygen combination that makes water. Hydrogen and oxygen are both flammable, but when they are combined as H2O they produce water, which works as a fire extinguisher! Similarly, several cytotoxic monomers, when polymerized, become cell friendly and could allow even some of the most difficult cellular organisms and explant cells from tissue to grow in the lab! This was the eureka moment, as their scaffold could grow stem cells at a time when the entire world was investigating stem cell research. But the joy was short lived as they realized their invention would need huge investments in time and money to become a success.

That’s when they began to look at things differently. They looked into cells of animal and plant origin both in the same platform. They found that the cell-friendly polymer had a great water conservation capacity, and their focus shifted to agriculture. This has earned them revenue, and it has also kept their other researches progressing. Using their technology, dry farmland in Arabian deserts has started producing strawberries and tomatoes!

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The “Electric-Biology” duo

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Two old pals, once classmates at Minami-Oei Primary School in Osaka city of Japan, never would have dreamt that they will jointly work to develop a commercially successful disinfectant six decades later. One of them, Sunao Kubota, became a physician and professor of General Surgery in St. Marianna University School of Medicine, and the second, Nobuyuki Yamaji, became an electro physicist with Kyoto University.

Yamaji was working on the implications of electric shock or lightning on plants and mammalian tissues, and Kubota was busy with his surgical work, trying to find a solution for his skin-allergy to alcohol. It was a casual meet-up in their native town a decade ago when they got to know each other’s work, with Yamaji describing to Kubota how plants and mammalian tissues secrete a unique layer of fluid after getting hit by lightning or electric current. Yamaji wasn’t sure of the significance of that layer of fluid, but as an electro physicist, he was thinking that the tissues might produce the secretions to neutralize the effects of the electric current. However, Kubota went back to his office and started analyzing of the ingredients of the secretion.

Eureka! One morning Yamaji got a call from Kubota saying that the significance of the secretion might be to prevent the entry of pathogens through the dehiscence made by the exit or entry of the electricity. For the next 10 years, Yamaji and Kubota worked to isolate the ingredients of the secretion, one of which was a form of citric acid, an ingredient of several food additives.

As their novel molecule could kill pathogens, Kubota didn’t have to depend on alcohol-based hand disinfectants when entering the ICU, and beyond that they have now made a multipurpose, alcohol-free product that can not only cleanse the hands, but also disinfect clinics, isolation units, operating rooms, etc. When they found out that their product could effectively destroy the influenza viruses (including the avian flu strain H5NI), they convinced the Japan Railways to spray their product inside the coaches of the trains during flu seasons. Today, a Japanese multinational company is selling their product with a brand name “Clinister” all over the world.

Kubota, a retired professor of general surgery, and Yamaji, a retired scientist, have become partners in a new business, which possesses the IP rights of their inventions. They have outsourced the manufacturing of their product to a pharma partner, and the exporting is done by a trading company. They have joined with companies in Asia for packing their products, and now are looking forward to a worldwide blast.

As I was reading the story on synthetic biology of Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchinson, I was reminded of Kubota and Yamaji.

I decided to give the title “Electric Biology” to this post about two septuagenarians who found a solution in biology from an original research on electric shock and lightning.

Though their association is from childhood, what has opened this new product to the world was their open-ness to discuss with each other their professional issues, even though they work in separate specialties.

Out-of-the box ideas and solutions are possible only when you share your problems with people out of your specialty; when you do so, solutions will pour in.

Samuel JK Abraham

Academic Serendipity to Clinical, Commercial Success

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I always say to my colleagues “Success has no formula, but failure does.” Often, biotech spin-offs yield more in experience than they do history. But I would like to share the story of a colleague of mine who went from a humble academic job in the microbiology department in a national university to a clinical success story. His lab in Tokyo is now providing cell-based immunotherapy via 6,000 transfusions a year, from all over Japan and from neighboring countries.

Hiroshi Terunuma started his career as a medical microbiologist in the Yamanashi University School of Medicine in the late ’90s, when he worked on HIV carriers in whom RNA transcriptome analysis was essential to understand the nature of the immune system. He had no other way to study the RNA transcriptome than to try a reproducible expansion of human immune cells, including T cells and NK cells, in the lab. He did years of basic work without even glimpsing the light at the end of the tunnel. But then he had a two-year tenure in Zambia for studying the immune systems of HIV patients, and even though he came back to Japan with additional expertise, still he and his colleagues had to burn the midnight oil to achieve a successful lab-expansion of the human immune cells. Finally, at the end of a decade of hard work, he got a breakthrough and patented it, though he found his invention was going to be more useful in treating cancer patients!

By then, the Lymphokine Activated Killer cells and Dentritic Cell based treatments had started as clinical applications in Japan, and his invention of being able to grow the Natural Killer Cells without feeder layers meant he had become an immunotherapist for cancer patients. Around this time, he was introduced to Tsutomu Kaneko, whose business expertise combined with the clinical and research expertise of Terunuma to produce a win-win for all involved. With this type of customized and autologous cell-based procedures being considered as clinical procedures as per the Japanese law, the two men produced the Autologous Immune Enhancement Therapy (AIET) for cancer using the patient’s own Natural Killer cells and with other immune cells such as T cells. Today, AIET has treated more than 10,000 patients and several Asian countries have started this treatment as part of the Terunuma team’s outreach via technology transfer. The patents are swelling; the company he started with Kaneko is debt free and earning a profit. Above all, though, the product is a worthy contribution to cancer patients.

I would summarize by saying the key elements for success were:

  • • The years of hard work in the bench to find the appropriate culture methodologies.
  • • Repositioning the invention to an application that was essential and in demand
  • • The availability of clinical data on autologous immune cell therapies for cancer
  • • A synergy-based partnership helped the scientists and clinicians contribute in areas alien to them.
  • • The “clinical procedure” recognition of the autologous immune cell treatment in Japan

 

Samuel JK Abraham

Malaysian BIONEXUS incentives

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As we started our work in Japan in 2000 on nano-scaffolds for corneal limbal stem cells (jointly with a group of polymer scientists headed by Yuichi Mori), the very first strategic move was to start collaborating in India, for two reasons. One was we needed a solution for treatable corneal epithelial damage-related blindness, and the other was the availability of qualified and skilled corneal surgeons.

The next move was to have a technology transfer tie with Malaysia, simply because the local investors there were willing to invest their hard-earned money in a biotech venture focused on a personalized immune-cell-based cancer treatment protocol that has been a medical treatment procedure in Japan since the late ’90s.

I was wondering what makes these investors come forward to invest in such ventures, and a brief exploration lead me to the incentives the Malaysian Biotech Corporation uses to attract investors and technocrats from near and far.

Imagine a government body that offers:

• An exemption from tax on 100% statutory income for 10 years from the day your company starts earning statutory income.

• A concessionary tax rate of 20% for another five years.

• Exemption of import duty and sales tax on raw materials, machinery, equipment and their components.

• Double deduction on expenditure incurred for R&D and that for the promotion of exports.

• 100% ownership and freedom to bring in knowledge workers from overseas.

• Exemption of stamp duty and real property gain tax within a period of five years until 31 December 2011, when undertaking a merger or acquisition with a biotech company.

• Tax deduction equivalent to the total investment made in seed capital or early stage financing when a company or individual invests in your company.

• Industrial Building Allowance to be claimed over 10 years with effect from 2 September 2006, on buildings used solely for the purpose of biotech-qualifying activities

• Tax exemption on dividends distributed to your company.

All this is part of what is called “Bionexus” status, as described by the Malaysian Biotech Corp. What’s been the impact?

• As of 6th May 2011, 188 biotech companies have been awarded the Bionexus status.

• Total investment has been 1.96 Billion RM (about US$600 million).

• Among the 188, close to 50% companies have started making profits.

• Five companies are now listed on international and local stock exchanges with market capitalization totaling close to RM1 billion (US$300 million)

One of the major difficulties companies with bionexus status face is the initial seed money for start ups, which the government is trying to address by various means.

Those who have biotech products and services for the South and Southeast Asian market (for which Malaysia can be good hub) with a technical team ready to move to Malaysia in place, should consider applying for the “Bionexus” incentives.

(The author is one of the directors of VisionTec Sdn Bhd, Malaysia. References for this post can be found here and here.)

Samuel JK Abraham

Virtual Professorship at Work; the SMART Initiative

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The days when the physical presence of a professional in the place of work or a meeting was mandatory are gradually becoming extinct, in the same mode that Brachiosaurus faded from planet Earth. Communication technologies have revolutionized the way meetings happen, and there isn’t the need to always physically gather at one place. If meetings can be made virtual, deals struck and businesses flourish without the need for physical presence and proximity, why can’t ideas ignite minds across the biotech world, and why can’t researchers be tracked in remote control?

The Singapore-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) has taken a smart decision in that direction, which I would equate to a “virtual professorship.”

Last year when I dropped in at SMART to meet a friend of mine, I found publications co-authored by faculty from MIT and by SMART, and I came across a lab-manager who had just come from MIT, where he oversaw the work done by Singapore-resident scholars.

SMART has produced a good infrastructure and has gathered many able hands and minds, but its novel system allowing the contribution of ideas and expertise by senior faculty without being physically present. In SMART, the virtual professor from another institute provides “idea-protocol & expertise,” which enlightens the researchers in a remote destination, who share the authorship, patents and other fruits of their joint work.

The physical space is of course important, as there are indispensable components such as the clusters of idea-igniting faculty assisted by a team of researchers, fuelled by the funding agencies and the strategic investors with exit plans after commercialization. There are difficulties, though, such as the delay in arrival of the materials for research or some expats who prefer to have shorter duration of stay.

Still, this novel initiative is worth being studied by new or would-be institution builders, as things have fallen in place fairly well, and in three years the SMART Bio-SYM team has published 45 papers and has 7 patents to their credit. Plus, one company is to be launched for commercializing a cancer drug screening application!

Samuel JK Abraham

Reverse brain drain and the Indian biotech “niche”

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For the past few years, we have received significantly more resumes from native Indian post-doctoral fellows from the US, searching for opportunities in India, which tickled me to explore the phenomenon of “reverse-brain-drain” in India and the biotech field. This phenomenon became popular after the dot-com bubble crisis, which forced many IT professionals from Silicon Valley to return to India.

In my opinion, China has gained a lot with the reverse brain drain phenomenon in biotech, as evident by the number of publications in high impact journals. The “knowledge-hub” creation-oriented governmental policies could be a major contributor.

However, the situation in India is not that encouraging. If India Inc. wants to be successful in achieving gains from a reverse brain drain in biotech, it should create an environment that is conducive for those talented individuals to come back, perform their best, contribute and remain.

Bringing back post-docs and putting them under the “old-time” systems with “red-tape” protocols will kill the spirits of those aspirants who want to do big things back home. I compare this to an in vitro cell culture system where we grow the cells taken from an in vivo environment. Though physiologically the environment or niche is different, we try our best to create the physiologically closest niche in vitro so that the cells will grow outside the body.

Similarly, rather than only bringing those post-docs (the cells) back, we should try to create systems (the niche) like those in developed nations. Some components of the niche could be:

  • Creating performance-based incentives and promotions
  • Maintaining confidentiality of proposals submitted through a single window to all funding agencies to prevent plagiarism
  • Allowing principal investigators to retain intellectual property rights
  • Being open to their entrepreneurship initiatives by establishing appropriate transparent systems
  • Allowing senior faculty from laboratories of accomplished nations to contribute to research projects in India.
  • The hope is that these elements would bring out the best from those talented individuals transplanted back home.

Samuel JK Abraham