Molecular Connections perceives inorganic growth path
Molecular Connections, a life sciences informatics major, is now looking at acquiring small and medium-sized companies as part of its inorganic growth strategy.
"The acquisition will depend on good technology fit and domain expertise that could plug into our products and services,'' Jignesh Bhate, CEO, Molecular Connections Pvt Ltd told Pharmabiz.
"We are aggressively scouting for companies both in India and abroad. If we lay our hands on an international company, we will have access to their customers. In the case of an Indian company, we are essentially looking at a synergy in content and database,'' Bhate said.
To facilitate these acquisitions, Molecular Connections has identified three options to raise funds: internal accruals, foreign loans and venture funds. The mode of raising capital will depend on the size of the deal and the company is in talks with foreign banks. Around $2 million was raised from Barings Private Equity in 2006 for expansion.
Early this month, Molecular Connections was adjudged as the most promising company of the year by CNBC-ICICI for the Emerging India Awards out of more than 3.5 lakh entries.
The company, with sound financials, was also recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the Technology Fast 50 India 2007 survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Asia Pacific. Molecular Connections was ranked 8th in India in the overall category.
The six-year-old company's product portfolio of informatics solutions focuses on protein interaction mechanisms of biological processes and also Biomarkers. Its maiden offering NetPro, the largest database globally on protein-protein has been upgraded with pharmacokinetics model. This is a market leader with repeat subscriptions from GSK, Aventis, Merck, Becton & Dickenson's bio-pharma unit and Galapagos NV, a drug discovery company.
The second product, CliPro's new version has been supplemented with biomarker data for clinical data. A recent product, Receptome is a comprehensive database of Functional Ligand-Receptor Complexes. Another new product, 'Xtractor' is a literature alert service, giving manually curated sentences of keywords as given by scientists.
All products are targeted at international customers because investments in informatics are increasing globally and the sector is getting its due importance. India pharma-biotech space will take a few years to utilize informatics' solutions offered from Molecular Connections, stated Bhate.
With collaborations helping to open a new dimension in research, Molecular Connections has partnered with the Bangalore-based Connexious Life Sciences for pathway work. Recently, it has teamed up with the Indian Institute of Science for a department of Biotechnology grant. The company's CYP database will be utilized by Prof P Kondaiah from the Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development & Genetics to customize drugs for the Indian population.
The global informatics market is valued at $6-8 billion. Of these four areas comprising validation & target identification, clinical development including toxicity studies, lead optimization studies, part of combinatorial chemistry is estimated at $6-8billion. Right now, Molecular Connections has the expertise in validation & target identification and is honing its skills in the area of ADME/TOX side and combinatorial chemistry.
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
"The acquisition will depend on good technology fit and domain expertise that could plug into our products and services,'' Jignesh Bhate, CEO, Molecular Connections Pvt Ltd told Pharmabiz.
"We are aggressively scouting for companies both in India and abroad. If we lay our hands on an international company, we will have access to their customers. In the case of an Indian company, we are essentially looking at a synergy in content and database,'' Bhate said.
To facilitate these acquisitions, Molecular Connections has identified three options to raise funds: internal accruals, foreign loans and venture funds. The mode of raising capital will depend on the size of the deal and the company is in talks with foreign banks. Around $2 million was raised from Barings Private Equity in 2006 for expansion.
Early this month, Molecular Connections was adjudged as the most promising company of the year by CNBC-ICICI for the Emerging India Awards out of more than 3.5 lakh entries.
The company, with sound financials, was also recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the Technology Fast 50 India 2007 survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Asia Pacific. Molecular Connections was ranked 8th in India in the overall category.
The six-year-old company's product portfolio of informatics solutions focuses on protein interaction mechanisms of biological processes and also Biomarkers. Its maiden offering NetPro, the largest database globally on protein-protein has been upgraded with pharmacokinetics model. This is a market leader with repeat subscriptions from GSK, Aventis, Merck, Becton & Dickenson's bio-pharma unit and Galapagos NV, a drug discovery company.
The second product, CliPro's new version has been supplemented with biomarker data for clinical data. A recent product, Receptome is a comprehensive database of Functional Ligand-Receptor Complexes. Another new product, 'Xtractor' is a literature alert service, giving manually curated sentences of keywords as given by scientists.
All products are targeted at international customers because investments in informatics are increasing globally and the sector is getting its due importance. India pharma-biotech space will take a few years to utilize informatics' solutions offered from Molecular Connections, stated Bhate.
With collaborations helping to open a new dimension in research, Molecular Connections has partnered with the Bangalore-based Connexious Life Sciences for pathway work. Recently, it has teamed up with the Indian Institute of Science for a department of Biotechnology grant. The company's CYP database will be utilized by Prof P Kondaiah from the Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development & Genetics to customize drugs for the Indian population.
The global informatics market is valued at $6-8 billion. Of these four areas comprising validation & target identification, clinical development including toxicity studies, lead optimization studies, part of combinatorial chemistry is estimated at $6-8billion. Right now, Molecular Connections has the expertise in validation & target identification and is honing its skills in the area of ADME/TOX side and combinatorial chemistry.
Be a part of the XTractor community. XTractor is the first of its kind - Literature alert service, that provides manually curated and annotated sentences for the Keywords of user preference. XTractor maps the extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies and enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biological significant relationships and it also provides the user with the ability to create his own database for a set of Key terms. Also the user could change the Keywords of preference from time to time, with changing research needs. The categorized sentences could then be tagged and shared across multiple users. Thus XTractor proves to be a platform for getting real-time highly accurate data along with the ability to Share and collaborate.
Sign up it's free, and takes less than a minute. Just click here:www.xtractor.in.
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