The second BioSpectrum Awards selection was a breeze. One, we had the tested format and a tested practice. Two, the constitution of the Jury was simpler. The chairman of the jury by our practice has to be the winner of the Person of the Year Award in the previous year. Three, there was more knowledge about the industry. Four, the Award Categories were well defined.

In sync with what was done in 2003, the Jury was constituted as early as September first week and the first and only meeting was held on October 18, 2004. The jury met at Biocon. The practice is to meet in the office of the chairperson of the jury. The chairperson of the jury was Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the winner of BioSpectrum Person of the Year 2003 Award. She is the chairman and managing director of Biocon Ltd and president of Association of Biotechnology Led Entrepreneurs (ABLE). BioSpectrum selected the remaining jury members to bring wide expertise from various fields to the process.

Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Mr KV Balasubramaniam, managing director, Indian Immunologicals, represented the private and public sector enterprises respectively. Prof. K VijayRaghavan, director, National Center for Biological Sciences, who has been actively involved in research, brought the thoroughness of the academic to the whole exercise. Mr Aluri Srinivasa Rao, director, investments, ICICI Venture Funds, Mumbai, was at hand to look the personalities and companies from a venture capitalist's perspective. The two representatives from the media were Mr Pradeep Gupta, pubisher of BioSpectrum and managing director, CyberMedia. and Mr Abraham Mathew, chief editor, BioSpectrum. Having two representatives from Cyber Media India Ltd is a dedicated practice followed by the group ever since it had established the first Awards for the IT industry - DATAQUEST IT Man of the Year as early as 1993, when the IT industry in India itself very small.

Jury Deliberations

The Jury Mrs Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director, Biocon Ltd Prof. K VijayRaghavan, director, National Center for Biological Sciences Mr Aluri Srinivasa Rao, director, investments, ICICI Venture Funds Management Co. Ltd Mr KV Balasubramaniam, managing director, Indian Immunologicals Mr Pradeep Gupta, managing director, Cyber Media India Ltd Mr Abraham Mathew, chief editor, BioSpectrum, Cyber Media (India) Ltd, Research Team N Suresh, Editor, BioSpectrum Ch. Srinivas Rao, Sr Assistant Editor, BioSpectrum

The category of the Awards was not a dilemma in 2004. The industry has widely accepted the four categories of Awards instituted last year. These Award categories were Life Time Achievement, Person of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year and Product of the Year. In 2003, it was decided to institute a Special Category Award. This was the State of the Year. During the deliberations, the jury decided not to select the State of the Year Award as most of the states were reeling under the preparation for the elections and also not much has happened in the states in terms of concrete progress in promoting biotechnology. Several states announced their commitments, but it was too little to gauge the progress made.

The Board was unanimous in the selection of all the awards. Dr Manju Sharma was chosen the winner for the Life Time Achievement. "Dr Manju Sharma started the Department of Biotechnology almost with no funds. She was taken from the Department of Science & Technology and did all the groundwork and created a good department and several institutes which are doing very well. She is a catalyst," observed Prof. K Vijay Raghavan. Mr Balasubramanian pointed out that she had the ability to get the successive governments both at the Centre and the states to commit to the development of biotechnology. Further, as she retired from her position as secretary of DBT in March 2004, it was the appropriate time to confer her the Award. "The relevance of Life Time Achievement will be lost, if the Award is not presented at the appropriate moment. And it would mean nothing thereafter," supported Mr Pradeep Gupta.

The Person of the Year was Dr Cyrus S Poonawalla, chairman, Serum Institute of India. The choice again was unanimous. Serum has put India very strongly on the platter of vaccines manufacturing capability globally. Poonawalla's ability to navigate through the times of controlled environments of the government to make Serum a world leader in vaccines is noteworthy. The Entrepreneur of the Year was Dr KK Narayanan, managing director, Metahelix. He is a first generation scientist-entrepreneur in the family and in just three years, has catapulted Metahelix to a hot shot BioAgri company. Not just that, he has successfully balanced research and evolved a steady revenue stream through services. Besides, Narayanan has been very active stakeholder in the draft recommendation for the MS Swaminathan Task Force Report on application of biotechnology in agriculture.

The last in the round of discussions was the Product of the Year Award. Again, it was a choice that had little deliberation. There were very few products introduced in the past year. Most of the products that were introduced were in the informatics categories. XCyton's JEV Chex, a diagnostic kit for Japanese Encephalitis Virus was chosen. The diagnostic kit was developed as a public-private initiative and was developed to suit to the disease, which is widely prevalent in many parts of India – a home-made product for country-specific disease suiting to Indian terrains of storage and climate.

The Awards will be presented on December 10, 2004 at Hotel Leela Palace in Bangalore.

BioSpectrum-ABLE Industry Awards

This year, BioSpectrum has added a few more awards this year. These awards are BioPharma Company of the Year - Serum Institute of India; BioAgri Company of the Year -MAHYCO Monsanto Biotech (India) Ltd; BioIndustrial Company of the Year - Biocon Ltd; BioServices Company of the Year- Quintiles; BioSupplier Company of the Year -Agilent Technologies; and BioInstitute of the Year - University of Hyderabad.

These Awards have been picked by the editors of BioSpectrum primarily based on the results of the annual BioSpectrum Top 20-the annual survey of the Indian biotech industry. The methodology is straightforward. The survey findings were reported in the August 2004 issue of BioSpectrum. Five key segments of biotech-biopharma, bioagri, bioinformatics, bioindustrial and bioservices-were analyzed and the top companies in each of these segments was identified based on the sales revenue figures for the FY 2004, except for the bioinformatics segment. Hence, an award was chosen for each of these segments except informatics. Similarly, the BioSuppliers segment was analyzed in the same survey and the top company identified. The BioInstitute of the Year has been awarded on the basis of a survey that was done in November 2004 by BioSpectrum alogn with CyberMedia Research. The University of Hyderabad ranked the highest in the survey.

In the ensuing pages, BioSpectrum presents the profiles of each of the BioSpectrum Awards.

N Suresh and Ch. Srinivas Rao