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INDIA BUSINESS WORLD - 16th March To 31st March - 2009
AVESTHAGEN RESTRUCTURES ITS OPERATIONS
AVESTHAGEN, Bangalore-based R&D driven biotechnology company, has restructured its operations into four independent profit and loss (P&L) entities as it wants these units to take care of their own financial requirement. Some of its subsidiaries will be brought under these P&Ls.
The existing areas of the company’s business namely bionutrition, bioagri and biopharma will be three P&Ls while the fourth one will the diagnostics and drug discovery work which Avesthagen wants to get into.
Villoo Morawala Patell, chairperson and managing director of Avesthagen said: “We are seeing a lot of interest in various players wanting to fund specific projects so we have restructured each unit into a self-sufficient entity. Avesthagen will now just be the parent or umbrella company for all these P&Ls.”
The move is aimed at the P&Ls raising their own finance and deliver the goods. “We are also cleaning up the organisation and hiring people,” she said. It has 450 employees, down from its earlier number of 650. Ms Patell said some employees left on their own.
The bionutrition P&L will include marketing subsidiary Good Earth while bioagri P&L will comprise of the seeds company Atash and agri- related R&D. The drug discovery P&L will focus on the Avesthagenome project and work on cancer stem cells. The company has already filed a patent for one of the markers in breast cancer and will shortly be publishing a paper in science journal ‘Nature’. The biopharma P&L is working on developing biosimilars in collaboration with Indian generic major Cipla.
Avesthagen has four molecules in the biopharma segment which are in pre-clinical stage. These are in therapy areas of cancer, auto-immune and anaemia.
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