Study lauds India's biotech industry

TORONTO, April 10 (UPI) -- A Canadian study suggests India's biotech firms are becoming major global players, increasingly able to produce drugs and vaccines at competitive costs.

The budding of an innovative Indian biotech sector holds major implications for the global industry and for improving both health and prosperity in the developing world, said study co-author Dr. Peter Singer of the McLaughlin-Rotman Center for Global Health at the University of Toronto.

"India is innovating its way out of poverty," said Singer. "With a massive and increasingly well-educated workforce, India is poised to revolutionize biotechnology just as it did the information technology industry.

"India's biotech sector is like a baby elephant -- when it matures, it will occupy a lot of space," he added. "The biotech industry is globalizing rapidly and the impact of India's market entry and contribution to improving world health is potentially huge."

The research by Singer -- with co-authors Dr. Abdallah Daar, Sarah Frew, Monali Ray, Rahim Rezaie and Stephen Sammut -- appears in the current edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology.