March 4, 2002
‘13’
RUSSIA TO COMMERCIALISE INDIAN HIV DIAGNOSTICS
Russia has expressed its readiness to join further research and commercialisation of HIV diagnostics developed by India. The two sides have also agreed to go in for collaboration in structural biology, rational drug design and delivery systems as well as take up joint projects in several areas of medical biotechnology. These decisions emerged at the just concluded third meeting of the Sub-working group on Biotechnology held here under the Integrated Long-Term Programme (ILTP) of Cooperation between India and Russia in Science and Technology. Cooperation in a network programme on edible vaccines is also on the cards.
The Russian side presented two new proposals i.e. molecular control of infloroscence Development in Asteraceae that is Mathermatical Model of Flower Development and Transgenic Plants as a Way to Produce edible Vaccines. Progress relating to development of transgenic sunflower and potato resistant to Sclerotinia, development of value added transgenic potato for better nutrition, sunflower chloroplast transformation system for obtaining highest trangene expression in genetically modified plants without environment risk, improvement of salt tolerance of wheat and other main crops by expression of genes and development of molecular markers for tagging of major disease reistance loci in Brassica and their application in marker assisted selection in plant breeding, were reviewed and it was agreed to continue all the on-going projects approved under the ILTP.
In the technical sessions, biosafety of transgenic plants and their technology transfer and commercialisation were considered. Biotechnology guidelines from the Russian side is to be made available to the Indo-Russian Centre for Biotechnology (IRCB)at Allahabad for information to all project partners and the Biotechnology Consortium India Ltd., New Delhi was selected to associate with IRCB for working out modalities on technology transfer and commercialisation of technologies from the Russian side on case to case basis. The working group expressed satisfaction over the implementation of all the recommedations made at the 2nd meeting of the group in Moscow, June 2000. Implementation of joint projects for the development of Hepatitis-C candidate vaccine was also discussed at length.
The meeting was co-chaired by Academician V.T. Ivanov from the Russian side and the Indian delegation by Dr. Manju Sharma, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology. The meeting was inaugurated by the Minister of State for Science and Technology Shri Bachi Singh Rawat. He underlined the need to strengthen Indo-Russian Biotech cooperation with adequate understanding of biosafety regulations, IPR issues and laws relating to exchange of biological material.