Be careful not to call it outsourcing

When Ramnath Reddy uses the word outsourcing, his colleague Michael Fernandes quickly corrects him. We're sitting around a coffee table in the lobby of the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, during a biotechnology conference.

''You mean partnership, not outsourcing," says Fernandes, who like Reddy works for Sai Life Sciences, a company with offices in Cambridge, San Diego, and Mumbai that helps biotech companies send their chemistry drudge work -- such as testing whether newly discovered drugs are toxic in animals -- to India.

Outsourcing (aka offshoring) has become a dirty word in technology circles over the past two years, as programmers in the United States lose jobs to programmers in India, the Philippines, Russia, and other low-wage countries. As the life sciences industry gets more serious about sending some of the work of developing drugs and conducting clinical trials overseas, they're trying to avoid the dreaded ''O" words.

At a panel discussion at MIT last month, Nick Terrett, a Pfizer chemist who contributed to the discovery of Viagra, noted, ''We use the term 'strategic sourcing,' not outsourcing."

Even though a growing number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies are shifting work to India, China, and Eastern Europe, among other places, I don't see outsourcing in life sciences causing as much of a ruckus as it has in high-tech. There are some good reasons why it won't -- not including the industry's feeble attempts at linguistic jujitsu.

Biotech and pharma companies are looking east for two main reasons: They want to save money, and accelerate the process of getting new drugs into the market.

Indian chemists with doctorateswork at about a fifth of the cost of their US counterparts, says Reddy, a native of Hyderabad. And drug companies conducting clinical trials often have an easier time finding doctors to help run the trial and signing up patients in foreign countries.

''The education level of clinical researchers is higher in places like India and Eastern Europe, because it's a better job there than it would be here," says Christopher Milne, associate director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. ''We have a shortage of investigators here."

And often, participating in a clinical trial is the only way that the ill in developing countries can get drugs.

As is the case in high-tech, Boston will be a hub of activity for companies that serve as liaisons, helping US life-sciences firms find partners -- to use Reddy's euphemism -- in other parts of the world. Parexel International, a publicly traded Waltham company that helps clients manage far-flung clinical trials in places like Ukraine and South Africa, is one example.

Other companies will be hybrids, situating some departments in Boston, and others in Bangalore. Kollol Pal is a principal with PureTech Ventures in Boston, a company that works with biotech start-ups and incubates companies of its own. Pal was born in Calcutta, but studied at MIT and Cornell University. He's focused on getting a new company, Tara Pharmaceuticals (tara is the Bengali word for ''star") up and running by summer. He's considering locations in Mumbai, Chenai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.

''There's a huge opportunity to actually do product development over there," Pal says. ''You can have significant time and cost savings in discovery and development. And the faster you can get a product out, the bigger the revenue opportunity" before its patent expires.

Pal plans to license drug candidates from academia (and possibly large pharma companies) in the United States, at a point when their commercial potential is still unknown, and have Indian chemists and pharmacologists sort through thousands of variants to determine which one has the best potential of working in humans. Think of it as a sophisticated version of twisting a Rubik's cube until all the colors align.

Much of that repetitive work is now done in the United States by robotic screening equipment, which can test thousands of drug candidates to see how they'll perform against a given disease. But ''some people believe that the industrialization of discovery hasn't been a complete success," says Josef von Rickenbach, chief executive of Parexel. ''To have a medicinal chemist guide the screening process, using his or her instincts, is very valuable. They have intuition about how things could work together which you cannot put into a machine."

In other words, lower labor costs in other countries make it possible to have a human handling tasks that are routinely done in Cambridge by a robot. ''If you find a viable compound through that process, that's a real big deal," von Rickenbach says.

Work is starting to shift, and companies large and small are beginning to build global networks of ''partners" like Sai and Parexel. So why won't we see candidates in next year's midterm elections talking about Benedict Arnold biotech companies rendering thousands of well-educated scientists jobless? Four reasons: