Eminent personalities from the bioscience and life science industry including Dr Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon), Dr Taslim Saiyed (C-CAMP), Mr Jon Mowles (UKTI-LSIO), Dr Balaji Ganeshan (TexRAD) and others graced the discussion with their presence. Mr Narayanan Suresh, chief editor, BioSpectrum, served as the chairperson for the discussion.

Commenting on the significance of innovation and collaboration with UK companies in the bioscience arena, Dr Kiran Mazumdar-shaw, chairman & managing director, Biocon, said, "There is tremendous innovation and ideation taking place in this industry hub. It is time for companies in the UK to start encouraging research groups in this part of the world. There should be a lot more intervention from both sides. The whole objective should be about face-to-face meetings and visits because seeing is believing. That's what will make it click."

Initially, there were two separate panel groups who parallely carried out discussions. One group discussed the importance of innovation and collaboration in the bioscience industry and the other on imperativeness of technology in the same context. The final round chaired by Mr Suresh, along with a few other delegates saw the culmination of the roundtable discussion with a short Q&A session at the end.

Mr Kam Dhaliwal, vice president of global sales, Horizon Discovery Limited, UK, another delegate at the session spoke about UK's underfunded biotechnology industry. He added, "My professional experience is centered around US and Japan. A lot of UK biotech companies are underfunded. Hence you do drug discovery on your own. That's a problem we have in the UK. UK is suffering tremendously from underfunding. This is where the UK government and set-up should help kick-start and continue to develop the expansion of UK biotech industry."