Genetic engineering, medical innovations, and biotechnology research
Specialty food-ingredient company Arboreal Bioinnovations has raised ₹230 crore in a Series A round co-led by EAAA Alternatives and Omnivore, with Rainmatter participating, to scale its R&D-led portfolio of natural sweeteners, next-gen proteins, cocoa ingredients and functional fibres.
Manik Gupta
Author
A Vallum Capital report released on 29 July 2026 argues India is well positioned to capitalise on a $300 billion drug-patent cliff and a global genomics boom, thanks to its unmatched manufacturing base and initiatives like the Genome India Project and Biopharma Shakti.
Manik Gupta
Author
ICMR has licensed three indigenous biomedical technologies — an anti-HPV therapeutic for cervical pre-cancer to Emcure, and two next-generation enteric-fever vaccine candidates to Biological E — under its Medical Innovations Patent Mitra initiative. The deals aim to turn publicly funded research into home-grown medicine.
Manik Gupta
Author
Researchers at IIT Bombay, led by Professor Debabrata Maiti, have published a Nature paper describing a reaction that selectively targets a single distant carbon on a straight chain and closes it into a ring — and used it to build the anti-cancer natural product muricatacin in just three steps from a cheap fatty acid.
Manik Gupta
Author
The government and the UK's Wellcome Trust have launched Phase III of the Biomedical Research Career Programme, a ₹1,500-crore fellowship scheme (₹1,000 crore from DBT, ₹500 crore from Wellcome) to fund Indian biomedical scientists across their careers and strengthen translational research.
Manik Gupta
Author
BIRAC has selected its first cohort of about eight biotech startups for backing under the government''s ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund, with term sheets worth ₹450 crore signed with three fermentation and synthetic-biology firms alone.
Manik Gupta
Author
Serum Institute of India manufactured the vaccine now in the world's first human trial against Bundibugyo ebolavirus — churning out roughly 620,000 doses in two weeks and supplying 4,000 for Oxford's newly launched Phase I study.
Manik Gupta
Author
Bengaluru deep-tech startup eNLife Research has raised ₹6 crore led by Piper Serica VC Fund to build an AI-powered blood test that aims to detect Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases years before symptoms appear — tuned to Indian genetic and lifestyle profiles.
Manik Gupta
Author
Molbio Diagnostics' Truenat HPV-HR Plus has become India's first indigenous HPV DNA test to meet WHO-IARC validation standards — and the world's first validated reduced-valency HPV test — promising affordable, point-of-care cervical-cancer screening at population scale.
Manik Gupta
Author
India's bioeconomy hit $195.3 billion in 2025. The new ₹2,000 crore BIRAC-RDI Fund and the BioE3 policy's shared biofoundries target the country's real bottleneck for synbio founders: scale-up capex, not science.
Manik Gupta
Author
StrainX Bioworks' $13M round and Alt Carbon's Microsoft carbon-removal offtake rest on the same bet: India's fermentation costs run a third to a quarter of the West, turning a cost base into a manufacturing moat.
Manik Gupta
Author
Serum Institute and Oxford's Jenner Institute have licensed R78C, a multi-stage malaria vaccine targeting two blood-stage antigens for more durable protection than single-antigen R21, pairing frontier antigen science with LMIC-scale manufacturing.
Manik Gupta
Author
India now has two approved indigenous CAR-T therapies priced an order of magnitude below the West. With Cipla's first export deal and Immuneel's ₹100 crore Series B, the binding constraint is no longer science but reimbursement.
Manik Gupta
Author
ICAR's SDN-1 gene-edited rice sidesteps GM regulation while claiming 19% higher yields, and GenomeIndia opens a 10,000-genome dataset, marking an Indian agri-biotech base built on indigenous tools and data.
Manik Gupta
Author
BIRSA 101, India's first indigenous CRISPR therapy for sickle cell, and a Vellore haemophilia trial reporting a zero bleeding rate in NEJM together turn the country's gene-therapy ambition into an investable, population-scale platform.
Manik Gupta
Author
