BENGALURU: The Karnataka government will soon set up a Pandemic Centre, a Longevity Centre and a Bio Centre at the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre (BBC) in Electronics City. Announcing this, Minister for IT/BT Dr CN Ashwath Narayan said the centre will be named after late actor Puneeth Rajkumar.
Speaking after launching the products developed by startups incubated by BBC-entrepreneurship and translational research centre- of the department of IT/BT, he said, while the Pandemic Centre will facilitate the development of vaccines and medicines, the Longevity Centre named will strive to curtail untimely deaths. The Bio Centre will cater to the needs of tissue samples required for R&D and innovations, he explained. The Bio-Banking will be the first in the country, he added, which will store biological materials like throat swabs, urine, phlegm etc, along with tissue samples. This will also speed up identification of infectious/non-infectious diseases, he said.
“Currently the centre physically incubates 50 startups. BBC has facilitated the product launch of more than 30 products on national platforms among which 22 products were related to Covid mitigation,” he stated.
The total valuation of companies incubated by BBC is around Rs 800 crore and it has been working in the areas of Life Sciences, Agriculture, Food/Nutrition, Industrial Biotechnology and Environmental Biotechnology, he told.
Several products like DNA/RNA extraction automation device, Rapid Antigen Self Testing Kit for the qualitative detection of SARS-CoV-2 in symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, RTPCR kit to ensure an adequate supply of blood free from infectious diseases, AI based monitoring of respiratory and cardiac distress inpatients using non-invasive bio marking and device for ensuring breathable filtered air was launched.
Kiran Majumdar Shaw, Chairperson, State Vision Group for BT, renowned Oncologist Dr Vishal Rao, Dr Jitendra Kumar, Managing Director, (BBC), Meena Nagaraj, MD, Karnataka Innovative Technology Society (KITS) and others were present.