Mavens Biotech Ltd - Stock Valuation and Financial Performance

Mavens Biotech Limited is a public limited company originally incorporated on October 24, 1981 and was initially involved in trading of agricultural and related products.The company went public in the 1982 with 2,48,000 equity shares at par, out of which 1,50,000 equity shares were offered to the public and balance 98,000 equity shares were reserved for Directors, Promoters, their friends, relatives and associates.

Mavens Biotech Ltd. is an integrated plant biotechnology company and operates in the area of bioinformatics, tissue culture and agriculture & food processing based research and development in the Indian biotechnology industry.

Business units of the company are:

Bioinformatics Center - The company has established a bio-informatics center to handle, capture, manage and analyze the large quantities of data produced during research by drugs, pharmaceuticals, health care, foods processing and agriculture related industries which can be used for drug discovery and diagnostics.

Plant Tissue Culture Unit - This SBU includes a well equipped commercial plant tissue culture unit for the production of high market value oriented horticulture and floriculture plant species.

The company is currently developing intellectual property and commercial applications in the area of agricultural bioinformatics, particularly in the analysis and management of extremely large volumes of data generated by high throughput technologies such as microarrays and metabolomics. The Company is working with imaging technology experts to deliver integrated solutions to agribusinesses. The basic reason of undertaking this activity is

• To undertake projects concerning DNA/protein sequence analysis and their preliminary structural and functional analysis
• To gather, store and manage in specialized databanks the vast amounts of biological data and analyze them into meaningful information and knowledge.
• To develop analytical applications that sort and organize the genetic data and systems that will help store and distribute the collected information

The company is active in plant tissue culture, the basic objective of the company to undertake it is

• To propagate high value plants by tissue culture
• To introduce new breeds of planting material which in turn would contribute in quality improvement and production of uniform genotypes and true to type disease indexed plants.
• To develop protocols and upgrade or propagate wide ranges of horticulture and floriculture plant species
• To accelerate vegetative multiplication and regeneration by controlling nutrient level, light, temperature and other factors

The company’s tissue culture unit is set up off Mumbai – Karjat. Its Infrastructure includes:

• The commercial laboratory has International Standard Growing Rooms, Clean rooms for production jobs, media preparation room, autoclave etc.
• The laboratory is secure against all kinds of technical and electrical failures that can be controlled for various temperatures and lighting periods.
• Green House and Nursery facilities are available for hardening tissue culture plants.
• For carrying out research and development work in the development of new varieties of planting materials, germplasm of different characteristic of various crops cultivated in different regions are taken. The Nursery has a Gene bank that is responsible for gathering and storing important species of medicinal, aromatic and floral plants.

The company is continuously involved in R & D, that includes

• Introduction of new breeds
• Development of economical protocols for commercial micropropagation and plant genetic engineering
• Research work for development / introduction of transgenic plant material and new cultivars in horticulture and floriculture biotechnology

Services offered by the company on Bioinformatics-

• Patent Information
• Sequence Analysis
• Software Development
• Bibliography
• Web Services

Services offered in Plant Tissue Culture includes-

• Contract propagation
• Supplying of wide range of horticulture plant, hardened plants and bulbs,
• Embryoculture
• Somatic Embryogenesis
• Keeping stock of breeding and parent lines
• Protocol development and selection
• Mutation induction in tissue culture

Products being offered are -

• Ornamental Plants
• Medicinal Plants
• Banana
• Sugarcane