Kerala's unique biodiversity needs to be preserved through the genomic data bank for further research: Sam Santhosh, Health News, ET HealthWorld
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Kerala's unique biodiversity needs to be preserved through the genomic data bank for further research: Sam Santhosh
The study of microorganisms has increased in relevance in light of the COVID outbreak. It is high time to invest in gene banks and genome data centers that will help us strategize the future through healthcare planning, synthetic biology, innovative biomanufacturing, and other areas of research that will ultimately impact and influence human life.
ETHealthWorld
Updated: March 14, 2023, 07:16 IST
Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Sam Santhosh, strategic adviser to the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategy Council (K-DISC), to know more about the Kerala Genome Data Centre, which is being set up with the aim of curating and publishing genome data that would become a critical step in boosting medical research and healthcare.
Launch of Kerala Genome Data Center (KGDC)
So the Kerala Genome Data Center (KGDC), is a very ambitious initiative by K-DISC as a part of its mission to convert or transform Kerala's economy into a knowledge economy. Kerala needs to build centers of excellence in various areas. And one of the areas that I suggested as an advisor to K-SISC was to take advantage of the huge amounts of genomic data that Kerala has and build a high capacity computer cluster for storing this data and as well as processing it that by enabling us to protect this data and also provide it for researchers, hospitals, startups and any corporates to build solutions and solve many of the problems that we are facing.
Need for KGDC
Kerala is very well known for its biodiversity. It has been recognized by UNESCO as one of the top biodiverse places in the world. This means that Kerala has a large amount of plants, animals, and fish and depth of aquatic creatures which are very unique and deep. Deep in the sense that there's a large number of species which have been isolated, have not interacted or mixed with other species. So giving us a lot of unique genomic data. If we are able to take those out and convert that data into the bits and into digital data that can be stored and studied so that we can track and trace the genes that are responsible for various interesting traits, like the medicinal plants that we have over 1000 of them.
And so we can create a gene bank that will be useful not only for improving the crops, but also providing data for new technologies and innovations that are happening, Synthetic biology and biomanufacturing. So these are the things that come in the future as a part of the bio wave. And all these things will need a genomic data. So the genomic data is going to be a rich treasuure for Kerala.
Implementing KGDC
The Kerala Genome Data Center is a very ambitious project, as I said earlier, and it will need a lot of funding. So initially the Kerala government has approved a budget of about 500 crores to be spent over the next five years. That will provide the core funding for this project. We are also hoping to add more funding through other grants and CSR sources. Currently this will be the core and the two parts of the project.
Part one is to set up the infrastructure that is a high capacity data center. So that will be set up in the digital university Kerala, and that will keep on enhancing both the memory as well as the storage capacity. Both are needed in a very significant amount for processing genetic data. The second part of the project is to generate the data. Kerala has about 125 life sciences research organizations across the small state. And there are a number of commercial organizations also that provide various products and services using various crops and other products, spices, etc.
So we will be pulling the capabilities of these organizations and identifying with the help, prioritizing the important crops and animals that we need to sequence. Sequencing will be outsourced to third party companies, but the data will be collected and stored in the genomic center. This will be implemented over the next four years.
KGDC:Benefit
The benefits that KGDC will provide are huge. First of all, getting all the data, genomic data, converting , digitizing , and putting them in a server, in a set of servers in a data bank itself is a big step as many of these plants and breeds get endangered and even might go extinct. So second big benefit will be the database that will improve the health of people, though we will be adding human data a little later. But the microbial data and the various other zoonotic diseases that can come across, all those can be tracked and traced using this genome data bank as a resource. So this will obviously create more jobs.
It will bring companies as well as the search organizations, not only from the other parts of India, but from across the world who will want access to this data. This will help the state of Kerala and India in developing the economy and as I said in the beginning, helping us become a knowledge economy.
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Tuesday, March 14, 2023 at 1:30 am