Pune’s Venture Center to host govt’s Regional Bioinnovation Centre

The Regional Centre at Pune is the third such Centre to be announced in the country and the first for the western region

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New Delhi: The Government of India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has selected Venture Center in Pune to host its Regional Centre. BIRAC is the government’s nodal agency for nurturing the biotech and medical technology industry. The Venture Center is the technology business incubator hosted by CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. This was formally awarded to Venture Center on 28 March 2018.

The Regional Centre is the third such Centre to be announced in the country and the first for the western region. The other two are in Bangalore and Hyderabad. This joint initiative between Venture Center and BIRAC will be called the BIRAC Regional Bioinnovation Centre (BRBC), and has been set up with the objective of strengthening and creating networks, services, information and resources to support and promote life sciences and medical technology start-ups across the country.

Dr Priya Nagaraj, who leads Venture Center’s Bioincubation vertical said that “Under the BRBC, the Venture Center shall be making available to startups an actively curated mentoring network, base camps on specific themes of relevance to startups, a regulatory information and facilitation service and a bioincubation practice school for other incubator managers.”

“BRBC will create absolutely new and powerful support mechanisms for biotechnology and biomedical engineering startups. This will be built by leveraging the joint expertise and resources of the Venture Center team and BIRAC who have been successfully supporting startups over the last several year”, said Dr V Premnath, Director of Venture Center. The Venture Center hosts more than 60 scientific startups and is the largest inventive enterprises incubator in the country.