Monday 14 January 2013

IIT-Madras develops artificial blood

IIT-Madras scientists have blood on their hands— and nobody is complaining. A team of scientists from the department of engineering design has been successful in creating enough red blood cells from stem cells to be used as ‘artificial blood’ in people who need transfusion. 
    Having proved their oxygen carrying capacity, the RBCs will now go into ‘mass production’ before starting human trials in three years, scientists 
said. The IIT team recently got a funding approval from the Union ministry of science and technology to produce artificial blood on an industrial scale. This blood would be tested on animals before human trials. If the trials prove successful, it will help hospitals overcome shortage of blood and save many accident victims. “We will be able to provide any amount of safe and disease free blood at half the cost of blood sold now,” said the study’s principal investigator, Dr Soma Guhathakurta, a visiting professor at the department of engineering design IIT-M. 
    In the past few months, Dr Soma and her team of researchers have made trillions of red blood cells – the carrier of hemoglobin that delivers oxygen to various body tissues and clears up carbon dioxide — on a Petri dish. They cultured adult stem cells derived from 
cord blood in the presence of some “easily nutritional supplements” for 17 days in the lab. 
    The stem cells, which are undifferentiated cells with the potential to turn into any cell, 
developed into red blood cells. The department of biotechnology (DBT) has recently approved a plan from the scientists to develop a bio-reactor for large-scale production of artificial blood. The reactor will be built with support of IIT’s biotechnology department. “We will simultaneously process papers for performing animal trials with the artificial blood. It will first be tested on anemic mice. If they are able to accept it and survive, we will take it to the next level,” he said. Globally, scientists have been working on artificial blood. While a French team has begun human trials, a UK team is set to follow suit. Dr Soma, a heart surgeon, says their research is different as unlike other cases, they have been able to exclusively produce red blood cells. So far nobody has been able to mass produce only red blood cells. 
    “Almost all earlier attempts have had at least 40% of white blood cells in the culture. Introducing such artificial blood into a patient with a weak immune system could be tricky. As a surgeon, I would prefer only red blood cells,” she said. 
    The IITians say they did not 
use expensive enzyme or growth factors. “Despite this, the yield was a billion times high. In a typical RBC blood bag, there are about a trillion (1 followed by 12 zeros) red blood cells. On our Petri dish we had a yield of about a quadrillion (1 followed by 15 zeros) cells from the starting point of about a million stem cells,” said Venkatesh Balasubramanian, associate professor in the department of engineering design. 
    The WHO says a country needs a minimum stock of blood equal to 1% of its population. This means India needs 12 million units of blood, but col
lects only nine million units annually, though demand has gone up drastically. The cost of blood has gone up in the last few years as blood has to be subjected to several tests to ensure it is disease-free, says Dr K Selvaraju, former state blood transfusion officer. This could be avoided in artificial blood. 
    It may take at least five years for artificial blood to be available for clinical use as large-scale trials will follow. The research hasn’t been published in peer-reviewed science journals owing to the intellectual property concerns of the scientists.

Wednesday 9 January 2013

IITs, IIMs to face peer review

India’s premier technical institutes, including IITs and IIMs, will be put to test soon. All centrally funded technical institutions, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) will conduct internal departmental reviews and be assessed by an external panel every five years. 
    This peer review by academia and industry, according to international benchmarks, is expected to bring about transparency and accountability to the institutes and could start from next year. 
    On Monday, the IIT Council gave the nod for all IITs to be subjected to a peer review. Elaborat
ing on the decision, MoS in the HRD ministry M M Pallam Raju said, “The Council of IITs decided that the peer review of each institute would be carried out on a periodic basis, once in every five years. IITs need to review themselves in terms of what is happening academically, in terms of research, in terms of evolutions towards meeting world standards.” 
    The move comes at a time when only a handful of India’s tech institutes have made a mark globally. The peer review will be based on similar well-established review systems in world-class institutions and would be forward looking. 
    Each IIT will similarly undertake an in-house, departmentwise review before any external peer review is carried out, the minister said. The review panel would consist of five eminent persons from the industry and the academia. 
    For the new IITs, similar exercise will be carried out after they complete five years. 


After tech schools, IIMs to hike fees too 

    Premier B-schools are now hiking their fees, too. If you’re planning to join the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) based on your excellent CAT 2012 score, be ready to shell out more than you’d budgeted for. With a total fee of Rs 16.6 lakh, the institute, which is ranked highest among all IIMs, leads the fee front. The increase will be applicable for the 2013-15 batch and the total intake will remain the same as last year (385). The fee for PGP students of the 2012-2014 batch of IIM-A for their first academic year was approximately Rs 7.4 lakh. IIM-A, in 2008, announced a nearly six-time increase in fee, from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 11.5 lakh for its flagship two-year PGP course in management. The fee was increased in the next two years to Rs 15.5 lakh for the 2012-14 batch. 
    Next to follow IIM-A is IIM-Raipur. Although it’s a marginal increase, the fee structure here is Rs 9.6 lakh compared to Rs 9 lakh last year (a hike of Rs 60,000). The other IIMs are yet to take a decision on fee hike.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

IIT undergrad fee hiked by 40k

Studying at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will be expensive by Rs 40,000 from this academic session. The Council of IITs decided to increase the annual tuition fees for undergraduate students to Rs 90,000 at a meeting 
in IIT-Delhi on Monday. 
    Announcing the decision, the minister for state for HRD, Pallam Raju said that the fee structure will be reviewed annually and that the revised rates will be applicable for the new entrants only and that the fee-waiver schemes for ST/ST and 25% of the students from economically disadvantaged back
ground will continue. 
    At present, the annual fee is Rs 50,000. The last fee revision was done in the 2008-09 academic session when the tuition fee was increased from Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000. An IIT spends Rs 2.25 lakh per annum per student. Announcing the hike, Raju cited the Anil Kakodkar 
Committee’s recommendation to make IITs financially independent on non-plan (operation) budgetary support to meet their operating expenditure. “We have enhanced the tuition fee to Rs 90,000 per annum from 2013. Revised rate will be applicable to new entrants of UG programmes and fee will be reviewed every year, but if doesn’t mean that it will be hiked every year. Like the IIMs, we want the IITs to be sustainable and fee is one of the ways. Barely 20% of the entire budget comes from fees in IITs,” said Raju. 
    The minister, however, said that no qualified student will be turned away because of financial constraints and “SC, ST students don’t have to pay any hostel or tuition fees. Al
so 25% of the students whose annual household income is Rs 4.5 lakh or less will continue to get 100% scholarships.” 
    Among other decisions taken at the meeting are that IITs will train graduates from National Institutes of Technology (NITs) to teach as they pursue their masters or PhDs at IIT. The IITs also resolved to ramp up their Ph.Ds from 3,000 to 10,000 by 2020. 
    The Council decided to enable top 15% students from NITs for a joint IIT-NIT trainee teacher scheme, whereby the NIT graduates will get teacher training at IITs and simultaneously pursue their master or Ph.D programmes to salvage the shortage of teaching faculty in the country.

Sunday 6 January 2013

Short on faculty, IITs look towards students

 Under-graduate engineering students from technical institutes may be able to teach and earn as they learn at the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). 
    Faced with a severe faculty shortage, IITs have proposed mentoring the top 15% under-graduate students from IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) and National Institute of Science Education and Research.     The proposal will be discussed at the IIT council meeting on January 7 to be chaired by human resource development minister M M Pallam Raju. IITs hope this joint program will enhance teacher quality and mitigate faculty shortage.     The selected students could be asked to undergo a trainee teacher program at NITs. “While initially they would assist in teaching they would simultaneously go through part-time post-graduate and doctoral programs so they can acquire higher education qualification that is a prerequisite for teaching at IIT and NITs,’’ sources said. 
    Students taking up teaching programmes is not an unusual feature in many western universities but they are more typically pursuing postgraduate programmes.
    IITs hope to produce wellqualified and skilled teachers and researchers while addressing the faculty needs for under-graduate students. The ministry had set up a committee to suggest solutions to the lack of faculty in all central government-funded institutes and studentteachers is one of the proposals being considered. 
    Students taking up teaching programmes is not an unusual feature in many western universities but they are more typically pursuing postgraduate programmes.    IITs hope to produce wellqualified and skilled teachers and researchers while addressing the faculty needs for under-graduate students. The ministry had set up a committee to suggest solutions to the lack of faculty in all central government-funded institutes and studentteachers is one of the proposals being considered.     According to HRD ministry, IITs suffer from a nearly 33% vacancy while the faculty shortage is about 35% in the NITs. The teacher-student ratio in the seven older IITs is about 1:16 at present, higher than the suggested 1:10. In the eight new IITs, the ratio is about 1:8, in adherence to the international standards. About 1,600 teaching positions are required to offset the faculty shortage in the 15 IITs in the country.

Friday 4 January 2013

Soon, study at NIT, graduate from an IIT

The highly competitive Joint Entrance Exam will no longer be the only route to the much-coveted campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. In a watershed decision, the board of IIT directors has decided to permit National Institute of Technology (NIT) students to complete their final year in an IIT. 
    On January 7, the proposal will be placed before the meeting of the Standing Committee headed by HRD minister M M Pallam Raju. Once cleared, lateral entry into the IITs will alter the landscape of higher education and ensure that academic high-flyers get ac
cess to the best. 
    The move will work at two levels: one, it will utilize the IIT resources optimally; two, the IITs will be able to attract better students and groom them for their PhD programme, thus boosting the count of doctoral fellows. The suggestion was made by the Anil Kakodkar committee in its April 2011 report titled ‘Taking IITs to Excellence and Greater Relevance’. Kakodkar suggested that while intense efforts had been proposed to attract IIT grads into the PhD programme, it was also necessary to attract students from other top engineering schools. “The NITs, along with some of the better engineering educa
tion institutions, should become important feeders of quality graduates into postgraduate and research programmes, including at the IITs,” the report said. 
    The IIT directors who met in Roorkee recently felt that if India had to be among the three largest economies of the world, the IIT system would need to grow manifold in terms of research output and the number of PhDs it produced. 
    “We also plan to change the time of our PhD admissions from February-March to August- September, the timetable followed by American universities, so that we can tap the brightest students,” said IIT
Guwahati director Gautam Barua. 
    The lateral entry scheme will work in the following manner. The IITs will identify bright students with a consistently outstanding performance in the first three years of their engineering course, look at recommendations from their teachers and evaluate their research potential through an interview. 
    Once identified, the students will be admitted immediately to an IIT and will complete their B Tech programme as well as their PhD in about five years. The graduate degree could be awarded by the institute they came from and the PhD in due course by IIT. 



LATERAL ENTRY 
• The IITs will identify bright students with a consistently outstanding performance in the first three years of their engineering course, look at recommendations from their teachers and evaluate their research potential through an interview 

• Once identified, the students will be admitted immediately to an Indian Institute of Technology and will complete their B Tech programme as well as their PhD in about five years 

• The graduate degree could be awarded by the institute they came from and the PhD in due course by IIT