Biotechnology offers tremendous advantages to Pakistan but to benefit from its true potential, the government and all key stakeholders involved in commercial activity, need to strengthen the 'university-industry linkage'.
This was the consensus among speakers at a seminar entitled "commercialisation of biotechnology products", organised by the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the National Commission on Biotechnology on Wednesday.
LCCI President Shahid Hassan Sheikh, Dr H U Khan, Director National Commission on Biotechnology, Dr Waheed Akhtar, Director School of Biological Sciences, University of Punjab, Dr Sheikh Riazuddin, Dr Yaqub Chaudhry, Dr Shahjehan Beg, Dr Farid A Malik and LCCI Standing Committee Chairman Mian Shahid Raza spoke and highlighted the importance of commercialisation of biotechnology products.
The speakers stressed the need for commercialisation of biotechnology by establishing links between universities, research institutions and industry to optimise the benefits of available expertise and infrastructure. They called for establishment of a platform for close practical interaction between scientists at institutions of higher learning and the industrial units.
They were of the view that public-private partnership in many industry-related ventures such as diagnostics, drug development and vaccine production would help achieve desired results.
Dr H U Khan said stakeholders should help in establishing a state-of-the-art national institutes and research labs for undertaking goal-oriented research in biotechnology. Dr Waheed Akhtar gave a detailed presentation on the commercial importance on enzymes production terming it a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide.
He said that industrial use of enzymes was increasing rapidly due to their specific activities and the environmental concerns. The enzymes find more and more applications in food, leather, cloth, garment, paper, feed, detergent and other industries, he added.
Dr Yaqub Chaudhry said the patronage of National Commission on Biotechnology had given a boost to the infrastructure and manpower for goal-oriented research in biotechnology.
However, he said, biotechnology transition into industrial products required major brainstorming among scientists, industrialists, international experts and policy makers.
Sheikh said recent advances in biotechnology provided ways of introducing very precise changes to genetic material that allowed, for the first time, the transfer of properties of a single gene from one organism to another.
These new techniques, commonly referred to as "gene technology", involved the modification of organisms by the direct incorporation (or deletion) of one or more genes to introduce or alter a specific characteristic or characteristics.
He said gene technology had wide use in the agriculture sector that was the single largest sector and a dominant driving force for growth and the main source of livelihood for 66 percent of the country's population. But unfortunately 40 percent of the total production is lost because of lack of preservation.