Rides on international tie-ups

VIT is forging ahead and strengthening its collaborations with industry and academia to help expose its students to biotech research

Vellore Institute of Technology popularly known as VIT offers a number of UGC aprroved degrees in biotechnology and biomedical engineering.

One of the most unique factors about the institute is that the college has one of the largest numbers of PhD qualified teaching staff in the country. The institute has faculty of 120 professors, 89 of whom are doctorates. These professors have successfully published in 210 international journals and 140 national journals in the last four years. There have been a number of luminaries visiting on a regular basis from Singapore, Germany, and Zurich. Also 1.65 lakh was received as royalties by some of these faculty members who have published books.

Currently there are 42 ongoing projects sponsored by government agencies such as DST, DBT, ICMR, CSIR, DoAE and the state government of Tamil Nadu worth 6 crore along with an additional 75 lakh from DST FIST. Also there have been industry sponsored projects to the tune of 10.5 lakh since 2009. A number of guest lectures, seminars and workshops were carried out last year at VIT, both by the in-house faculty as well as other academicians.

As a result of the research carried out at VIT, two products have been successfully transferred to the industry. They are a method for glucose oxidase production to TCL, Ranipet and selenium enriched food products to VKP sons, Rajapalayam. The department has filed for nine Indian patents and three international ones since 2008. These patents mostly deal with novel biomaterials, enzymes and techniques in fermentation technology.

The department has spent a staggering 4.05 crore for the improvement of its laboratory infrastructure since 2009. There are 24 teaching labs with a capacity of 50 students and 22 research labs with the capacity of 15 students.

A host of life sciences companies such as Mahyco, Biocon, Dr. Reddy's, Agilent Technologies, Piramal Healthcare, and Omics made 67 placement offers. Some of the international collaborations include those with John Wayne University; Fribourg University in Switzerland; University of California; and University of Hannover, Germany.

Fact file | Name of the Department: School of Biosciences and Technology
Courses: BTech Biotechnology, Bioinformatics, Biomedical Eng, MTech Biotechnology, Biomedical Eng, PhD
Director: Prof G Anilkumar Gopinathan
Website: www.vit.ac.in/sbst/sbst.asp

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"VIT has MoUs with over 150 national and international universities which help students pursue their higher studies and also carry out their final year projects. These MoUs enable faculty members to conduct research in collaboration with others."

Prof G Anilkumar Gopinathan director, school of biosciences and technology, Vellore Institute of Technology

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