A £45 ($70) million fifty-fifty partnership between the UK's Wellcome Trust and India's Department of Biotechnology (DBT) to support development of “affordable healthcare products” is just the kind of boost small Indian biotech companies hankered after. The initiative announced 29 July builds on the existing £80 ($124) million alliance launched in 2008 to strengthen the biomedical research base in India (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 1202, 2008). The added impetus is for translating research into medical products “that are not totally market driven but are required by people at [an] affordable price,” says DBT secretary Maharaj Kishan Bhan. Venture capitalists usually shy away from backing products that do not have a big market, he says, and the new partnership plugs this gap. Chandrasekhar Nair, director of Bigtec, a Bangalore-based startup, which has developed a diagnostic handheld microarray is investigating biomarker detection for early identification of chronic diseases. Nair says that under the Wellcome-DBT alliance his company may consider sourcing microfluidics capabilities from UK universities to fast-track the device's development. Banda Ravi Kumar of XCyton Diagnostics, Bangalore, says a government loan enabled the initial development of their diagnostic DNA Macro Chips device. “Thanks to the new initiative, we are looking actively to develop another such platform for oncology with Oxford Biodynamics that has an epigenetics-based technology,” he says.