Profiles of Top BioSuppliers
09 August 2006 | News
Better Science
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Waters India is a leader in high performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry products.
Waters Corporation's high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), mass spectrometry (MS), and services are synonymous with quality and performance in analytical labs around the world. Waters is a publicly traded corporation (NYSE: WAT) headquartered in Milford, Massachusetts. It is a member of the Standard and Poors' 500 Index. The company has manufacturing facilities located in Milford, Massachusetts, Taunton, Massachusetts, Wexford, Ireland and Manchester, England. Waters sells direct in most of the countries its serves.
Waters differentiates from the competition by providing best in class products backed up by best services in the analytical instrument industry in India. Waters sales and marketing personnel and the service engineers are highly trained and have great regard in the industry. Waters Corporation are the recipient of Omega Northface Scoreboard Award for excelling in customer service expectations. The study covers Technical support, field service, Sales Process, customer service and Product Quality. The "Acquity UPLC" through its "disruptive Technology" broke through the conventional performance barriers of speed,sensitivity and Resolution. Waters Acquity Systems sets new standards in terms of speed, throughputs and quality of LC and MS Analysis.
Waters India started operation in 1988. In 1997, it became a subsidiary of Waters Corporation. Major areas of activities in India include: sales and marketing of LCs, MS, informatics solutions and the wide range of columns and chemistries supported by a wide network of Customer Support group. Customer support includes apart from installation and maintenance support of equipment, exhaustive efforts in the areas of application support,customer education programs and validation support.
KV Venuguoplan has been president of Waters India since it became a subsidiary of Waters Corporation. Under his leadership, Waters India business has grown at a high double digit for the past five years. Waters India has achieved the distinction of best performing subsidiary of Waters Corporation in 2005. Waters India is headquartered in Bangalore with field offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.
Waters customers in India are the major biotech, pharmaceutical companies and major testing centres. Its products and services help the pharmaceutical companies analyze their products to develop new molecules, to determine physico-chemical properties, conduct clinical trials and meet quality requirements for release of manufactured products. Most major prescription drugs are analyzed on Waters instruments.
With addition of Informatics solutions range, Waters can provide comprehensive end-to-end solution for labs, from sample preparation, to data handling to report generations for submissions. Waters Corporation is a leader in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry products world over and Waters India is leader in this market in India.
Instrumented Sophistication
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Spinco Biotech has come a long way since its inception. Today it is a trusted name in the Indian instrumentation industry and represents some of the best principals in the world.
S pinco Biotech celebrates its silver jubilee in 2006. Well known among the customers as distributors for Shimadzu HPLC, Spinco Biotech offers an array of instruments for Proteomic and Genomic research. With a network of fifteen offices and two hundred plus marketing, tech-support, application and customer relationship personnel, Spinco Biotech is one of the market leaders in analytical and life science instruments in India.
The two important milestones in the history of Spinco Biotech are the gifting of the 2000th HPLC to Cancer Institute, Chennai on February 5, 2000 by the then Chairman of Shimadzu Corporation and the recent Customer Appreciation Banquet held in December 2005 celebrating the 1000th installation of LC-2010HT integrated HPLC. The company also distributes Shimadzu LCMS, Protein Sequencer, DNA Sequencer and GC, GC-MS for Andhra Pradesh, Eastern and North Eastern India.
To complete the chromatography product line, Spinco Biotech is associated with various other manufacturers of detectors, columns and consumables. A few of them are: Wyatt Technology, USA (Molecular Size and Weight Detector), Polymer Laboratories, UK (Evaporative Light Scattering Detector), IN/US Systems, USA (Radio Chromatography Detector), PDR-Chiral, USA (Chiral Detectors) and Antec-Leyden, Netherlands (Electro Chemical Detector). Spinco Biotech promotes HPLC columns of Phenomenex, USA and Chiral Columns of Daicel Chemical Industries, Japan.
The group company Spincotech keeps stock of huge inventory of chromatography consumables and spares to supply almost from stock.
Spinco Biotech also has a strong portfolio of products under the Life Science Group. It is associated with Affymetrix Inc., USA (GeneChip System, the Gold Standard for Microarray), Kratos Analytical, UK (MALDI TOF-MS), Shimadzu-Biotech, Japan ('Xcise'-Automated Gel Processing, ChiP-for Peptide Mass Fingerprinting and Protein Macroarray Analysis, 2D Micro-HPLC for proteome analysis and AccuSpot for automatic LC micro-fractionation and spotting) and APPTEC, USA (Peptide and Organic Synthesizers) etc. It also distributes NIR systems for instantaneous measurement of raw material from Foss NIR, USA. Laboratory, R&D Freeze dryers from VirTis, USA and Production capacity freeze dryers from Hull, USA are the other products, the company is known for.
Precision Mechanist
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India's growing economy and precise R&D activities will help Shimadzu Analytical (India) increase its growth rate.
Shimadzu Analytical (India) Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shimadzu Corporation, Japan has been offering technologies in the field of analytical and scientific instrumentation, diagnostic medical imaging, and process control instrumentation, environmental monitoring to different industries including life sciences and biotechnology. It takes pride in the R&D in the areas of its specialization. Shimadzu has established its name in the R&D and QA labs in the country. In April 2006, it has opened its customer support center equipped with the state-of-the-art instruments in Mumbai. The center will focus on customer training and aid in analytical method development for its customers.
Shimadzu Analytical (India) is investing about Rs 4 crore (100 million Yen) in India. With an initial staff strength of 20 personnel, it plans to increase it to 40 within a year. In addition to overseeing the activities of the customer support center, it will also provide marketing support to its distributors.
With an annual turnover of Rs 150 crore, Shimadzu has been marketing its products through distributors namely Toshvin Analytical, Amkette Analytics, Swan Environmental, and Spinco Biotech for more than 35 years (since 1970). About 60 percent of its total sales were from the life sciences industry. Shimadzu has 30 percent market share in the analytical and scientific instrumentation market in India that is estimated to be about Rs 500 crore.
Shimadzu is setting up a software development center to meet the Corporation's software needs. The center will also act as a support hub to the South Asia region. Shimadzu is looking at achieving a target of Rs 300-400 crore in the next five years.
Shimadzu's biotech division is focused on providing integrated solutions for life science and drug development and accelerate the progress of biotechnology in research and development. Shimadzu Biotech represents a new way of thinking in the health and life science sectors by combining a core competence in instrument design and manufacture together with strategic partnerships to advance the development of knowledge in biotechnology. Product offerings include mass spectrometry integrated with enabling technology for high throughput analysis (MALDI, LC/MS, automated systems for analyzing gels with mass spectrometry) and specific solutions for DNA analysis (ranging from UV spectroscopy to chip-based electrophoresis) among a range of other offerings. One of its researchers, Dr Koichi Tanaka, shared 2002 Nobel Prize for chemistry for the development of Matrix Assisted Laser De sorption Ionization, a popular technique to ionize proteins, a useful tool in biotechnology research.
Health Booster
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GE Healthcare's vision for the future is to enable a new 'early health' model of care focused on early diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention.
GE is a diversified company with each of its businesses managing their own staffing needs, including foreign assignments. GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and its expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions. The company's vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the UK, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.
GE Healthcare is broadly divided into five areas of research, bioprocess, protein sciences, discovery sciences, genomic sciences and services. The company has equipment and reagents to target these four broad categories (plus services). Its India branch office is a direct marketing and sales office for the Global GEHC life sciences group. The products range from drug screening, cellular assays, cell processing, nucleotides, enzymes, biochemicals, radiochemicals, nucleic acid synthesis, amplification and purification, DNA sequencing, microarrays, proteomics, electrophoresis, spectrophotometry, blotting, imaging and analysis to protein purification.
Recently GE announced a $250 million infrastructure investment in India, with projects targeted in infrastructure, healthcare and real estate. ''Our target is to create sales and assets worth $8 billion by 2010. We will focus on infrastructure, while increasing our footprint in financial services, technology and developing business with our local partners,'' GE chairman and CEO, Jeff Immelt said. GE will be a partner in Dr Naresh Trehan's Medicity project, a world-class integrated healthcare facility in New Delhi. Beyond financial investment, GE will also provide end-to-end early disease prediction, diagnosis and monitoring tools like advanced medical diagnostics, Cathlabs and anesthesia systems, and partner in clinical research and education programs.
GE Healthcare is focusing on educating and implementing an early health model, while developing and introducing new products designed to meet specific Indian needs - delivering easier, earlier and more accurate care in locations with limited access to hospitals. It is setting up India's first radiopharmacy center in Delhi. The new radiopharmacy center will offer isotopes and radiopharmaceuticals in unit doses to various nuclear medicine hospitals and healthcare centers in and around Delhi. The company has planned additional radiopharmacy centers for Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The center will be operational by the end of the year.
GE Healthcare is looking at entering the real-time label-free protein interaction analysis market by acquiring Biacore AB for SEK330 per share, an offer that values the company at SEK3.2 billion ($435.9m) or about SEK2.9 billion net of Biacore's cash reserves.
