Interview

Delivering more for less

With changing industry dynamics, the demand for IT solutions has increased tremendously, especially in the drug discovery area where customers have higher expectations with lower tolerance level. Dr Armaity Davierwala, Senior Consultant, Life Sciences, Persistent Systems speaks with Suja Nair on the company's role in the life sciences sector

What are the services that you provide to the life sciences industry?

For the last nine years Persistent's Life Sciences team has been providing research to leading institutes in pharma and biotechnology industries with solutions and tools to analyse, integrate and disseminate data quickly and effortlessly. The lifesciences business unit at Persistent is one of the fastest growing businesses and contributes about 12 to 15 percent towards revenues. Most of our customers are basically from US or are companies who have their arms in India, thus there is no compromise when it comes to standards. We develop expertise and useable software components for four main domains like bioinformatics, clinical informatics, medical devices and instrumentations and lab automation. For all these different domains we provide services ranging from data integration and data warehousing, laboratory information management systems (LIMS), regulatory compliance, visualisation and analytics.

Life science segment is a niche segment, how are the challenges here different compared to other segments?

Life science sector is a difficult sector to get into. What we have observed is it is very difficult to get an initial break into a company. But once we develop a relationship they are long lasting. We have been working with companies for about 10 years and they are still with us. We work with MNC's and generic pharma and biotech companies, and also with large number of medical devices and instrumentation companies. We also work with lot of academic institutes, universities and cancer centres. Some of the universities we have worked with are Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center in St Louis; we have also worked with Broad Institute of MIT, Dana-Farber Cancer Centre, Yale University, Indiana University and several others. In India we have been working with National Institute of Virology (NIV) for whom we had developed VirusLIMS software. This would help them to manage the information in their virus laboratories.

What are the initiatives taken by your company to ensure prominent contribution to the industry?

For us customers products is more important than anything else. IT has emerged as a very useful contributor to the Life Science business today, and the medical and Life Science players consider their IT vendors to be prominent contributors to the industry as well. What we are trying to do in Life Sciences is to see how we can help customers enhance their product and how we could give them valuable suggestions and inputs. For this reason we have recently developed Persistent Indiana Research Centre. This is a research centre which Persistent had set up at the Indiana University in Bloomington and the basic aim of this centre is to further the development of informatics, specifically in Life Sciences, medical research for chemistry, bioinformatics and so on. Thus the idea is to advance the creation of service offerings to help customers improve drug discovery and bioinformatics, in cancer research and instrumentation diagnostics.

What is VirusLIMS and what is its modus operandi?

VirusLIMS is a web based information management system that can be used to manage both the viral outbreak data in the field as well as laboratory information when they would be actually testing the viral strain in the labs or in the clinical setting. NIV which is based in Pune has other small centres across the country so this LIMS is basically designed to be able to link all these different centres for people in different outbreak regions to be able to directly feed their data into the system so that the scientists sitting in Pune can actually access this information and get all the required data. Thus if there are any multicentric trails or multi site testing then they can easily use this web based information management system and track all the sample data, and specimen information whenever necessary. This application was launched by Dr V M Katoch at NIV and had a very positive response and we are hoping to sell this application to other customers as well in future.

What is the notable trend in the life sciences sector (Pharma and Biotech)?

There is lot of traction in the life sciences domain which has led to the increase in demand for these services from the pharma and biotech industry. Pharma companies have been investing billions of dollars for R&D and one of the greatest challenges or concerns to the pharma industry today is that drug discovery costs are escalating and pipelines are thinning. Therefore they want to try and use newer methods and improve the number of drugs they can develop, to reduce the costs and time required for drug discovery etc. So they are hoping that IT would be able to help them do this by using new software tools which will enable them to use to either manage their data to analyse their data quickly and meaningfully. Significant work is being carried out on this front by Persistent's Life Science division.

suja.nair@expressindia.com