The government is considering an ₹8,000 crore outlay and a not-for-profit company to anchor advanced genome research and innovation, aiming to create a genetic database of diverse population groups to improve public health management.
The Expenditure Finance Committee has examined the biotechnology department’s proposal, which could soon be placed before the Cabinet for clearance, two people aware of the development said.
A solid India-specific reference genome will help distinguish normal population variations from disease-causing mutations, one of the people said. The research findings will help develop low-cost diagnostics, improve prediction of drug response, and support targeted screening for genetic disorders and various diseases for precision medicine, he added.
The development assumes significance given that India’s vast population, comprising hundreds of diverse groups with high levels of endogamy, remains underrepresented in global genome databases, which are currently dominated by European ancestry.
The plan also involves a scale-up of two existing flagship programmes—GenomeIndia and IndiGen—that have created India’s foundational population genome resources and may be merged with the upcoming initiative, anchored by the not-for-profit company.
Queries emailed to the departments of expenditure and biotechnology remained unanswered until press time.
Self-sustaining company
As per the proposal, once the Section 8 company achieves a degree of institutional maturity, it will start generating revenue to meet its own operational expenditure, making the programme self-sustaining over time, one of the people said.
A Section 8 company is a special type of non-profit entity licensed by the government mainly to promote charitable activities, including art, science, sports, education and research. While it operates like a traditional company, it’s bound by a strict non-profit objective, and any profit it makes is ploughed back into its operations to further that objective.
“This is a good initiative. However, the real test of this genome sequencing should not become an end in itself,” said Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, a public health expert.
“The programme should prioritize affordable diagnostics, early identification of inherited diseases, improved cancer treatment, rare disease management and clinically useful research relevant to the Indian population,” Lahariya added.
The research findings will help public health decisionmakers implement targeted screening where a mutation is frequent, conduct counselling in high-risk communities, and better predict susceptibility during pandemics.
India had a genome research programme before, but the covid-19 pandemic accelerated the country’s genome research speed.
“Given the pandemic experience, advancements in capacity in this area will help us be better prepared for future emergencies and emerging biological threats,” said global health researcher Dr Anant Bhan.
Status of extant programmes
Launched in 2020, the biotechnology department’s GenomeIndia project completed 10,174 whole genome sequences, created a national genomic variation catalogue, set up a biobank with over 20,000 biospecimens, and identified nearly 180 million genetic variants, minister of state for science and technology Jitendra Singh informed the Rajya Sabha in July.
This initiative spans 20 institutions and seeks to build a comprehensive catalogue of genetic variations capturing the country’s extraordinary diversity, to better understand health and disease.
Similarly, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s IndiGen programme was launched in April 2019 to address the paucity of whole-genome data from diverse Indian populations.
This initiative has completed whole-genome sequencing of 1,029 self-declared healthy individuals from across the country, helping benchmark population-scale sequencing.
International scenario
The US leads global efforts in genome research. In a statement in June, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the US said its All of Us Research Program has made available data from more than 747,000 participants, making it the world’s largest integrated genomic and electronic health record database.
The latest data release includes more than 535,000 whole-genome sequences linked to nearly 482,000 electronic health records, the NIH said.
The UK Biobank has garnered genomic and health data of half a million people and has linked hundreds of DNA markers to diseases. Other critical genome initiatives include Singapore’s PRECISE, BioBank Japan and South Korea’s National Project of Bio Big Data.
