Interview

Not just another brick in the wall

As Bilcare Clinical Research enters into its fifth month of operations, Santosh Hegde, President, Clinical Research Services, Bilcare talks to Garima Arora about what sets the institute apart from the rest

What is the USP of this course?

This is a one-year course organised jointly by Association of Clinical Research Professionals (ACRP) and Bilcare Academy. The curriculum has been worked on for over a year. We have a state-of-the-art academy and the best infrastructure possible with global classrooms. The USP continues to be that we do not admit more than 50 students per batch maintaining a teacher to student ratio of 1:10. Secondly, ours

is a 12-month program where a ten-month theoretical training period is followed by two months of hands-on experience of hospital, industry and research training. This hospital industry internship provides hands-on experience of clinical trials. Thirdly, the students get a one-year membership of ACRP. Further, since we have a global classroom set up we have video conferencing, which enables us to have people from the ACRP pool of trainers interacting with students.

Why did you choose this particular time to launch the program?

We were primarily into pharmaceutical packaging. We then specialised in clinical research packaging, which is a totally niche packaging segment. So once we were in this position the most obvious thing that we could do, since our customers were both CROs and drug discovery companies, was to diversify. Instead of diversifying into a space where we would clash with our existing customer base, we thought of moving into the education space. We did this keeping in mind the background wherein everybody keeps talking about how India will need around 50,000 clinical trial professionals by 2010. In such a scenario, ACRP, who are the sponsors of the institute, were under lot of pressure to set base in India and to create a pool of certified professionals. They have been looking for partners in India for the last four and half years and we were also looking for partners to set up an institute. Hence it was a very good fix between ACRP and Bilcare. We then moved on to becoming the face of ACRP certification in South East Asia, including India.

This certification from ACRP is like an accreditation which is accepted world-wide and is common to most clinical research professionals world wide.

In fact, Johnson & Johnson has already said that all people employed by them will have to be ACRP-certified. A lot of companies will follow suit because ACRP has become a standard for professional training.

What courses does your institute offer?

We have started with the post graduate diploma in clinical trial management, with four lectures a day. Every student is given a laptop, which he can take with him on completion of the course. Everything is WiFi-enabled on campus. After the classroom training is over, the students hang out in the Inno café, which gives them an opportunity to interact and work on projects. We also have a personality development module that looks at developing an individual's soft skills. We have a trained psychologist to look at this arena. So we look into the overall development of students that will train and prepare them for the industry in all ways possible.

Who do you have amongst your faculty?

We have an intellectual and interesting pool of in-house and guest faculty. Dr Ravindra Ghooi, Dr Anoop Agarwal, Dr Medha Joshi, Dr Sanjay Reddy, Dr Pratibha Nadig, Dr Mahesh Burande, Aradhana Uttaappa, Dr Shalaka Agarkhedkar, Soumi Duttagupta, Zenobia Merchant and Manjiri Joshi are part of our full-time faculty.

We also have an advisory board that overlooks the working of the institute and curicullum on the whole. The board includes Thomas Adams, President and Chief Executive Officer, ACRP, Washington, Dr M Venkateswarlu, Drugs Controller General (India), Dr Himadri Sen, President (Generics and NDDS) Ranbaxy Laboratories, Gurgaon, Dr Aakash Ganju, Director-Global Clinical Operations (GCO), Johnson & Johnson, Mumbai, Dr Arun Bhatt, President, ClinInvent Research, Mumbai, Dr Durga Gadgil, Director-CR&D India Region, Wyeth Research, Mumbai, Jay Soman, Managing Director, UNI-SANKYO, Hyderabad, Dr K H Sancheti, Sancheti Institute for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, Pune, Dr K M Prasanna Kumar, Sr Prof and Head, Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, M S Ramaiah Medical College and Hospital, Bangalore Dr R J Jha, Senior Vice President-Clinical Research, Wockhardt, Mumbai, Dr Sudarshan Arora, President- New Chemical Entity Research , Lupin Research Park, Pune and myself as Member Secretary.

When and how are you going to expand to other cities?

We have recently inaugurated an institute at Bangalore. This is a complete novel method of starting a clinical research institute. The institute is situated within the premises of the Bangalore Diabetic Hospital, which does research and educates people in diabetes research. At the moment, there are around 15 global clinical trials going on here. This gives the students a chance to be in close vicinity of where the real action is. We plan to carry this kind of model to all our existing and future institutes.

What according to you does industry need and how is your institute meeting this need?

The industry wants trained professionals who can be absorbed straight into the mainstream. They do not want to spend any time in training them, especially in times like these where attrition rates are so high. That is exactly what we promise them.

garima.arora@expressindia.com