LUCKNOW: On the lines of Hyderabad-based Genome Valley, Jeevropana Life Sciences, an organization dealing with different aspects of human life, has proposed to set up a ‘Life Science City’ with the initial capital investment of Rs 1000 crore over a sprawling 100-acre land in Greater Noida.
“With the signing of MoUs and identification of land, the rest of the modalities regarding the land deal will be completed in the next 2-2.5 months,” says Prof (Dr) Ram Shankar Upadhyaya, a Sweden-based NRI who is one of the directors of Jeevropana. Prof Ram is a scientist and a professor at Harvard Medical School as well besides heading Laxai Life Sciences as CEO in Sweden.
“One of its kind in India, the idea behind Jeevropana -- a Sanskrit word which means healing the lives-- is to provide people of Uttar Pradesh requiring an all-round development of infrastructure including the medical and health infrastructural services available and affordable for all the sections across the society,” says Dr Upadhyaya while talking to TNIE.
He adds that the Life Science City in Noida will focus on the holistic approach towards new drug discovery development through a specialized research and development unit which will work from conceptualization to commercialization of new drugs catapulting the country into the next drug hub.
Moreover, the Life Science City will also have other verticals including target identification, target validation, and identifying and developing the right drugs with disease-modifiable properties than just treating or controlling the disease.
“The drugs will be developed with a focus on disease reversible properties,” says Dr Upadhyaya who belongs basically to Agra.
Even genome sequencing and profiling will also be one of the verticals at the Life Sciences City. The proposed project will have a different set of skilled workforce, the R &D unit equipped with all kinds of cutting edge technologies comprising of genomics, proteomics, next generation sequencing (NGS) with an aim to find the medication for non-treatable diseases like cancer, elaborates the Sweden-based professor.
“Besides having the facility for clinical trials of the drug research, we will set up three hospitals which, unlike any other hospital, will collaborate with leading world hospitals bringing the dividends of international research in the field of drug discovery to the country. We are already in discussion with the institutions like MD Anderson Cancer Centre at Texas University in Houston, Mount Sinai hospital in New York and Sloan Kettering Institute. We will facilitate the services of those institutions in such a way so that we can provide the precise and targeted treatment to patients required by them,” says Dr Upadhyaya.
The Jeevropana is also in touch with a couple of institutions in India for whom humanity comes first before anything else instead of being commercial in their orientation. “We will partner with such medical organisations and we will make a joint venture including the Indian and foreign hospitals to facilitate their services to the needy,” says the professor.
Dr Upadhyaya claims that the project will create job opportunities for at least 20,000 people across different sections.
“It will help create an ecosystem where the new age scientists, researchers and medical students would come into the field of drug discovery and lead the domain for generations ahead,” feels the scientist.
He says that the standout point of the proposed ‘Life Science City’ in the vicinity of the upcoming Jewar International Institute is to develop it on the hotel-hospital concept at least for the terminally ill patients inflicted with ailments like cancer as to give them the feel of a normal life in the company of their family members thus reducing their stress and psychological weakness and harnessing their immune system to enable them to fight the disease they suffer from.
Thus the aim of Life Science City, at least one vertical of which is excepted to be functional in the next two years, will not be only to find the root cause of disease and its treatment but also to provide the most crucial preventive care to ensure the holistic well-being of the patients, says Dr Upadhyaya. Moreover, a national institute of futuristic infectious diseases will also be set up at Life Sciences City on the lines of the Pune-based National Institute of Virology to cater to the people of north India.