BENGALURU: The city will soon be home to a centre that will be armed to fight any pandemic or deadly diseases in a proactive manner.
Called Centre for Pandemic Preparedness, it will be one of the three centres of excellence that will be inaugurated at Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre (BBC) in Electronics City. The other two centres set up by the government are Longevity Centre and Bio-Repository Centre.
Dr Vishal Rao, member of Karnataka State Vision Group on Biotechnology, and regional director (head & neck surgical oncology and robotic surgery) at HCG Cancer Hospital, said the Centre for Pandemic Preparedness will bring the world’s best people together under a single umbrella.
“We had been on a reactive mode while fighting Covid-19 till now, but this centre will take us ahead of such pandemics. It will have public health and data science experts, institutions, etc who will proactively map developments and virus mutations while aggregating global data services,” said Dr Rao, adding that biotechnology and science and technology will play a pivotal role in driving the three centres.
The vision group, under the chairmanship of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson of Biocon Ltd, has been in talks with the government about the centres. “We have received support from chief minister Basavaraj Bommai and science technology minister CN Ashwath Narayan,” Dr Rao said.
Jitendra Kumar, managing director, Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre, said the pandemic centre has collaborated with IISc and other elite institutions. “It will focus on controlling any pandemic in future by addressing questions like — how did the virus mutate, which are the genetic groups that it strikes at, what are the animal carriers, etc. There will be space for innovations for quick tests of such infections. It will start operations within six months,” he said.
BBC is a joint initiative of the department of biotechnology, government of India, and department of electronics, IT, BT and S&T, government of Karnataka. It is a state-of-the-art translational research and entrepreneurship centre catering to the needs of startups in life sciences.
Bio-Repository Centre
Dr Rao said the Bio-Repository Centre will encourage the ecosystem to solve common problems. Kumar said the centre will be a gold mine of bio-information with a collection of diseased tissues and cells for future studies.
“The samples will be collected from patients across the country. It will be a bank with samples grouped according to diseases (cancer, diabetes, Covid) and population. Publicly accessible, it will help researchers study diseases, how it affects some groups of people and what can be their therapy. It will also aid in creating vaccines for other diseases,” he explained.
