Rx Propellant announces launch of 9 lakh sqft of lab spaces in Hyderabad

HYDERABAD/MUMBAI: India’s leading life sciences infrastructure and cluster developers, Rx Propellant, on Tuesday announced the launch of 9 lakh sqft of lab spaces in Genome Valley of Hyderabad. The foundation stones for two new projects, B-hub and GV1, were laid by Industries & Commerce Minister K.T. Rama Rao.

With a major footprint in Genome Valley, Rx Propellant has already developed 5 lakh sqft of lab space, most of which are operational with marquee names in Life Sciences. In total, the current planned development of Rx Propellent at Genome Valley constitutes 7 independent projects namely, Innopolis, Genopolis, Touchstone, ARX, Nextopolis, GV1 and B-hub, spread across 17 lakh sq ft.

Laying foundation for the new projects, Minister K.T. Rama Rao said, “I am glad to be a part of yet another milestone in Genome Valley which is Asia’s most formidable Life sciences cluster. The foundation stones I laid for the projects will fuel the R&D ecosystem in the region facilitating global investment and local employment opportunities."

"Telangana is home to over 800 Life Sciences companies and our scale makes us major contributors to Global healthcare. Investments such as these will enable faster scale-up of companies to continue charting the growth path, also significantly promoting economic growth in the state,” he added.

One of the key projects, B-hub, is a Biopharma accelerator being built in collaboration with Telangana government to boost the Research ecosystem in Genome Valley. Spread across 2 acres, the 1.6 lakh sq ft, B-Hub features a fully functional biopharma scale-up manufacturing facility along with a GLP grade turnkey incubator of 40,000 sq ft.

Director, Lifesciences and Pharma, Telangana Government, Shakthi M. Nagappan, who was also a part of the foundation laying ceremony, said, that the government of Telangana was committed to enabling high-quality turnkey R&D laboratories, flatted factories, incubation centres and warehousing parks as a plug-n-play leasable infrastructure of international benchmark to the life sciences companies investing in the State.

He welcomed the investment and efforts made by Rx Propellent to add 9 lakh sq ft of labspace to the Genome Valley Cluster. 

Speaking during the event, Rx Propellant CEO Milind Ravi said, “We are pleased to announce the next phase of Rx Propellant's growth in Hyderabad and are thrilled that Mr. KT Rama Rao is a significant part of this launch. Rx Propellant is changing the paradigm of R&D Infrastructure in India along with the global outlook towards India when it comes to research facilities and ecosystem. In fact, India’s life science industry has been one of the fundamental drivers in achieving better health outcomes, domestically and globally and we aim to deliver an even more compelling environment to the Life Sciences industry that would be on par with the best-known global R&D hubs.”

The company has invested INR 900 cr in development of current Life Sciences infrastructure and is committed to invest an additional INR 2000 cr to build a cumulative portfolio over 100lac sq ft of lab space over the next 5 years across Hyderabad and other major Life Sciences hubs of India.

Rx Propellant Managing Director Vishal Goel said during the event that, “India is at the centre of Global innovation and Drug Discovery which is demonstrated in India’s vaccine developers’ response to Covid crisis and the subsequent tremendous growth in Drug Discovery outsourcing to India. Rx Propellant is accelerating its growth to support the ambition of CROs and Drug Discovery companies in India. We have built a team which understands science and now we are translating it into creating curated infrastructure that supports quick ramp up of operations.”

Groundbreaking ceremonies for Phase II of three existing projects were also performed in Innopolis, Touchstone & ARX.