Hyderabad: The first day of the BioAsia 2013, which started amidst much pomp and grandeur in the nawab city of Hyderabad, India, on January 28, 2013, saw several developments related to the life science sector. During the initial half-of-the-day, the delegates of the event, including Ms Carmen Vela Olmo, honorable Minister of State for R&D and Innovation, Government of Spain, and other international and national delegates visited several biocluster spread across the city of Hyderabad, in order to get a better idea of the functioning of the life sciences industry in the region.

The delegates were taken through a field trip for showcasing the state-of-the-art infrastructure of at the biocluster, including Lonza Knowledge Center, IKP Knowledge Park and Alexandria Knowledge Park, located in the Genome Valley in Shameerpet, Hyderabad, India. This biocluster is India's first organized cluster for life science R&D activities, with more than 100 companies.

Lonza Knowledge Center is a knowledge center-cum-manufacturing facility in Hyderabad, India, set up with an investment of about $140 million. The center focusses on custom manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), among others, for companies involved in innovations. The knowledge centre is located in a 27-acre plot in the Genome Valley.

IKP Knowledge Park (previously known as the ICICI Knowledge Park) is situated in a 200-acre pollution free zone in Genome Valley. The park's objective is to nurture an environment for innovation and the expected growth in life sciences and related fields. It has a mix of ready-to-use multi-tenanted modular wet laboratory blocks (Innovation Corridors) with in-built flexibility around some common, shared facilities and support services, as well as developed land for customised R&D facilities. Around 35 acres of land has been developed with utilities for customised R&D centres.

Alexandria Knowledge Park (AKP) was developed as a public-private partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh and has evolved as a preferred destination for leading Indian and global companies to conduct R&D activities. AKP is spread over 306 acres and has a unique mix of individual campuses with multi-tenanted research buildings and incubation facilities.