Instrumental Advances

Owing to various collaborations, during 2006-07, the revenues of Imperial Life Sciences were Rs 39. 25 crore, high from an expected Rs 35 crore.

CEO: Suresh Kumar Gupta
Revenue: Rs 39.25 crore
Start-up Year: 1992
Address: Plot No. 463, Sector 37-II, Pace City II, Gurgaon
Tel.: 91-124-4559800-99
Website: www.imperialls.com

E stablished in 1992, Imperial
Life Sciences (ILS) is in the
business of instrumentation, reagents, software and other consumables, providing complete solutions for laboratories working in genomics, proteomics, drug discovery and bio-production process. It is the exclusive representative for around 48 global players in India like Agilent Technologies, Invitrogen Corporation (Gibco, Molecular Probes, Dynal, Caltag, Biosource, Zymed), IDT, CBS Scientific, Amresco, Fitzgerald and various others.

During 2006-07, the company's revenues were Rs 39.25 crore, high from an expected Rs 35 crore, owing to various collaborations. Last year it had registered revenues worth Rs 26.88 crore. So the year has been good in terms of growth. This was basically due to the closing of deals with Agilent Technologies (November 2006), Invitrogen (January 2007) and Caliper, each to the tune of around Rs 1.5 crore. In terms of segmentwise break-up, cell culture registered the maximum growth reaching revenues worth Rs 785 lakh in 2006-07, up from Rs 198 lakh in 2005-06. Revenues from instrumention and lab equipment almost doubled from Rs 695 lakh (2006-07) to Rs 845 lakhs.

The company is a life sciences provider with a wide range of products, more so with its association with Invitrogen that itself has acquired seven companies. The new product segments that have been added include bioproduction (raw material for vaccines), high end instrumentation (automated liquid handling systems), thus lending specialized products. Hence the company can take a project from the first phase of genomics research to the last phase of data integration.

Imperial Life Sciences has four product segments - bioproduction, genomics, molecular biology and immunology and clinical site. It has recently started custom services in the field of genomics, proteomics and cell biology mainly Q-PCR for Real time analysis of PCR, Bioanalyzer for analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins and cells, Speed Cycler, the fastest thermal cycler in the world, iBlot for Protein transfer in just 7 minutes, automated DNA sequencer, automated DNA workstation, liquid handling systems and bioinformatics. ILS will soon be introducing custom services for microarrays.

The company has seen some major deals including one with Reliance Life Sciences for around Rs 3 crore for bioproduction, University of Hyderabad for their genomics segment, a cancer project with MAHE-Manipal and CCMB, Genova, Serum Institute of India.

ILS also wants to position itself in application support in order to acquaint people with technology by doing contract research services and training workshops and camps for students and teachers to have hands-on experience with these technologies. ILS plans to become a total solution provider and a one stop-shop to the Indian scientific community. n