The Indian government has set aside £13.3m for medical genomics research over the next five years, reports last week's British Medical Journal (BMJ). But the announcement has provoked controversy, coming in the wake of recent budget cuts to India's malaria and leprosy control programmes. Professor K Vijay Raghavan, of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, said that having too many genome centres was unwise. 'They eat up resources with dubious possibilities of returns' he said.
Dr Vasantha Muthuswamy told the BMJ that the money would be used to address problems relevant to India and 'to prepare the country's medical community for the era of molecular medicine'. Projects likely to gain support include studies on oral cancer, cervical cancer and identifying new drugs for malaria and tuberculosis.
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