TCS bags euro 1 mn Italian biotech deal

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global technology services company, has entered into an agreement with Congenia, a bio-technology start-up, promoted by Italy's Genextra SpA group, to provide advanced fragment-based optimisation solutions for drug discovery.

"The agreement is the first of its kind for an IT company. It is a historic occasion for TCS, and the first contract where, the deliverable is not software code, but a set of molecules," said M Vidyasagar, executive vice-president and head of the Hyderabad-based TCS Advanced Technology Centre (ATC).

Vidyasagar told newspersons here on Thursday that, the contract was worth over €1 million. It has a duration of 18 months and incorporates payments based on the number of optimised lead molecules delivered.

Stating that this agreement was not just a foray made by the company, Vidyasagar said, that TCS was very serious about entering the area of drug discovery, given that the global pharma research and development budget was $40 billion annually, and the addressable market was an estimated $6 billion a year.

Commercial offerings by TCS in this area would be its bio-suite, bio-cluster products, integrated database and analysis tools and customised software development.

He said that the Life Sciences and R&D Division of TCS would work on 'P66', a target protein identified by Congenia as a key protein involved in several age-related diseases, and develop optimised drug leads based on this.

The company's ATC team, which has a strength of 35 people now, was also being strengthened to meet the needs of the new business.

According to Vidyasagar, TCS would be using modules of its own product, Bio-Suite, to work on the target protein. It would screen a 'virtual fragment library' of tens of thousands of potential lead molecules to predict which of these might bind themselves to the target protein and thereby, inhibit its function.