Biopharma company Biocon is seeing increasing demand for its contract research services in allied areas such as agrochemicals, petrochemicals, and even electronics — into which it has recently expanded — as an offshoot of its core biopharmeceuticals and biologics research expertise.

While biopharma is by far its main revenue-yielding area for research services, the firm says the diversification into other segments gives it the dexterity to maintain the growth momentum.

The research services subsidiary Syngene and the clinical research arm Clinigene together crossed the $100-million revenue mark in FY13, growing 36% over the previous fiscal. Syngene, in which GE Capital last year bought a 7.69% stake for R125 crore, is looking at going public in FY15.

“Our strategy at Syngene and Clinigene is to build a comprehensive range of discovery and development services to enable us to offer increased and integrated support,” said Peter Bains, director of Syngene International, at a recent interaction. “We see demand growing against that background in the biopharmaceuticals sector, the pharmaceuticals and the biologics sector. We also see increased demand in associated areas like agrochemicals, veterinary and even some which could be considered more remote, like petrochemicals and electronics.”

The entry into some of these remotely connected areas began 2-3 years ago as an extension of the work the material science division was doing, mostly relating to formulation development in polymers for the release profiles for pharmaceuticals. “This is a relatively small component of our business. What is important is that we can diversify our customer base,” said Bains.

The diversification, however, had begun earlier with research into nutritional science followed by agrochemicals and veterinary science.

Biocon’s contract research services — India’s largest contract research organisation and Asia’s second largest after China’s WuXi AppTec — says it sees potential for more applications from polymer and material science. Demand for contract-based research in drug discovery and development is typically driven by the productivity challenges that life sciences companies face in innovation, which has led to an increase in the allocation of work to an external research agency as well as collaboration.

source: http://www.financialexpress.com / The Financial Express / Home> FE> Story / by Ajay Sukumaran / Bangalore – June 21st, 2013