How do you view the changes that have happened in innovations in the life sciences sector in the last few years?

In India, very rightly so, ambitions are growing. At the government level, ambitions are growing to build new tech and new capabilities. The government clearly sees the value of entrepreneurship as a driver of change and innovation as the real driver within that. 

We have been, for long, importers of solutions. It is time to build new solutions, and the governments realise that we’ll have to come up with our own innovations so we can grow further. That’s where the new impetus is coming from. It needs to be very mission-mode driven. So, under the larger push that is coming from the government, what is required is a mission-mode approach in identifying areas with clear deliverables and a timeline and meticulous planning to achieve it. All stakeholders must come together and be accountable to deliver the goals.  

C-CAMP has played a major role in changing the perspective towards life sciences start-ups. What was that journey like?

It was very important for an organisation like us to quickly realise that while we enabled fantastic innovative solutions, the uptake of them in the field was actually quite seldom and that we were missing out on an opportunity to make an impact. But it is not only a market problem. You have to understand the complexity of different geographies and the markets they represent. 

India is very complex. On top of it, there are complexities of working with various state governments and departments. There are other market factors such as tenders, distributors, behavioral patterns, practitioner bias, user behaviour and so on. So, we began working with stakeholders who are key to the uptake of new solutions in our focus fields. These include state governments, FPOs and so on.

It was very important to be nimble, to keep our eyes and ears open to what was happening around, identify where things were not moving, have a very practical, analytical understanding of it and then build a hypothesis of working towards making a a change over time. 

To sum it up, there was a realization, a realisation-based assessment and assessment-based intervention from our part and now we are seeing the results.

If you look at many of the world-class life sciences start-ups that have emerged from India, C-CAMP seems to be a common thread…

Many of them, even today, work out of the C-CAMP campus.

I see it ike a top-notch university. A top-notch university has amazing professors, but the common thread is the university itself and the environment it provides.

The start-ups here want to be here because they feel this is where they will find a nurturing environment. At C-CAMP, the idea is to provide the intellectual environment and a world-class setting where they can build their innovation. It’s the environment which actually takes you to the next level.

Many start-ups have been here for years because they like the intellectual scientific environment here, and that is a culture. That is the strength of any such place in the world. If you enter IISc, you feel there is a lot of science happening. If you come to C-CAMP, similarly, you feel there’s a lot of innovation. The best places have a critical mass of amazingly talented people. What C-Camp is building is this critical mass of talented innovators in one place.

Do you think there should be more innovation centres across the country?

Definitely. The government too, in an earlier budget, had proposed that there should be five more institutions like C-CAMP. There should definitely be more such centres, because this is not big enough for the scale of India. But they should not be positioned as spaces merely for incubation. We need organisations which are practitioners and enablers of science and innovation to nurture more deep science start-ups.

What are some of the challenges still persisting?

I think a very big gap is in taking the amazing research within academia and using it further for innovation. We need more and more scientific ideas, outcomes and scientific talent that can be utilised to build new solutions. I believe we should double down on our investment in research.

We need to build, through investments, a demographic that is super talented in science and technology. By investing heavily in research and science, you will not only have more people getting trained in India, but also staying back in India and leading innovations and companies here.  

The second challenge is what is called ‘the valley of death.’ After you build the proof of concept, you will be able to raise some early-stage money. But after that, the struggle begins. There are not as many deep science funders as needed, still.  

Another challenge is the difficulty in scaling up and doing large-scale production and manufacturing. The government is trying to address this by setting up manufacturing hubs. But right now, there are none.  

Fourth is the pace at which regulatory processes move. It’s getting better, but still not fast enough. And fifth is the challenges when it comes to market uptake.