The IIT Alumni Council has launched Engineered Biomolecule Mega Incubator (EBMI), an initiative to align start-ups in India's offensive against the Covid-19 pandemic.

The council will make a direct investment of ₹500 crore in phase 1 of EBMI, and an ecosystem investment upwards of ₹10,000 crore. The National Capital Region will be developed as a global hub for biologics manufacturing.

The incubator, with a 2.5 million sq ft area, will be the largest in the world. EBMI will have direct access to over 30,000 PhDs through Technical Institutes of Excellence (TieNet) and a virtual presence in every smartphone.

EBMI will be part-funded by the council’s MegaFund, and it will support the initiatives of MegaLab and MegaTx.

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“IIT Alumni Council is playing a lead role in strengthening the entire Covid ecosystem — from diagnostic testing to biotherapeutic treatment. Given that over 70 per cent of a RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction) or NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) test kit in value terms are biomolecules, we understand the need and urgency of focusing on this domain,” Ravi Sharma, President, IIT Alumni Council, said.

“Most advanced biotherapeutic drugs from insulin to interferon to plasma antibodies are biomolecules. We believe that we can influence a very substantial cost and price reduction in bio-therapeutics. The ultimate goal of IIT Alumni Council is to make sure that every person in India is able to afford genetic tests like Covid-19 and biotherapeutic treatment. This is the only way to make India healthy and safe in the face of feared antibiotic resistance and future pandemics,” Sharma added.

Engineered biomolecules play a key role in molecular diagnostics, genetic testing as well as biotherapeutics, besides a host of applications in sectors from water treatment and agriculture to advanced genetics.

The IIT Alumni Council is the largest global body of alumni, students and faculty, spread across all the 23 IITs and partnering TieNet.

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“The MegaIncubator will be global and aspires to reach out to any technocrat startup promoter anywhere in the world that is pursuing deep technology in the Biomolecule domain. Using a mobile app, it would be possible to onboard an incubatee virtually at the speed of thought,” Hemant Gupta, an IIT alumnus MD of Zone Startups India (an institutional partner of EBMI), said.

“The MegaIncubator is architected smartly, stitching together existing cutting edge infrastructure to create an end-to-end phygital support system for aspiring Biomolecule startups, thereby accelerating the time to market manifold,” Gupta added.

Zone Startups India manages close to 50,000 sq ft of incubator space in the BSE Building in Mumbai and the Banaras Hindu University Campus, with the support of NITI Aayog and Department of Science & Technology.

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