Scientists from any field of biological research will be encouraged but we specially plan to develop the following areas in the long term.

Human genetics will be a strong component because of the importance of genetics in understanding many common diseases to which patients are predisposed.

A second area of interest is immunology, because of the relevance of immunology to not only infectious diseases, but also to auto immune disorders and cancer. A good molecular biology focus will also be helpful in terms of relevance to different disciplines in medicine.

A strong focus on haemopoesis and stem cells would be very helpful in the future because much of the understanding of normal cell biology has come from development of research in haemopoetic systems. Although the focus should be predominantly in mammalian systems in the academic centre, it should not exclude lower organisms such as yeast which are simple to set up and powerful in terms of understanding mammalian biology.

Bioinformatics has become a very important discipline in modern biology, particularly with the completion of the human genome sequence. We plan to invest in this area particularly with people who are from biological backgrounds but may not necessarily know much about software development, but also people from a computer background who may not necessarily know much biology. Such a selection of people would allow questions to be asked and design of appropriate software to analyse the enormous amount of data already available publicly. Such a group of people is also important to help analyse researchers who do microarray or proteomic experiments.

Cancer research is an area, which is to be developed, given the increasing incidence of cancer in India.

Research into the broad area of signal transduction will also be performed given the importance of this in many diseases.

Neuroscience is a fast developing area in which analysis of molecular mechanisms relating to brain functions is important for the
detection, treatment and development of therapies against various brain disorders .