Expat scientist-entrepreneurs are relocating to India to offer cost-effective healthcare innovations

Global scientists of Indian-origin, who have made path-breaking discoveries in the field of healthcare, are moving to India to test, validate and market their innovations. Their aim is to provide handy, affordable solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening diseases like cancer. Shiladitya Sengupta and his team, who developed technology to help in cancer treatment at Harvard-MIT division of the Health Sciences and Technology in Boston, have founded a start up - Invictus Oncology - in India.

 The Delhi-based start-up is developing nanomedicine - or a drug smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of human hair - which hones in on tumours and reduces side-effects. It shrinks tumours by cutting off blood supply to it and continues to sit on the tumour till it dies. 

Sengupta is one among the many newgeneration scientists who are putting their research to meaningful use and building affordable, low-cost products in India. "I was told that this is a crazy idea as nobody discovers drugs in India, especially for cancer," says Sengupta, whose team aims to develop a drug from India that can be used globally. 

Start-ups such as this hope to tap the healthcare market in India, which is expected to swell five-fold and touch $280 billion in 10 years. Some of these cuttingedge technology entrepreneurs spoke to The Economic Times on the sidelines of EmTech India, a technology conference, organised by MIT's Technology Review.  

Achira Labs Dhananjaya Dendukuri and Suri Venkatachalam are the founders of Achira Labs, a two-year-old medical diagnostic start-up, which has developed a proprietary lab-on-chip platform that can perform a number of tests, including those for thyroid, diabetes and infertility. 

The company's chip platform is designed to deliver diagnostic results within minutes of testing, allowing rural patients to receive immediate medical care without having to wait for days or weeks. 

"Not having access to diagnostic facilities has been the bane of India's rural population. Our focus is, if you can't come to us, we will come to you," says Dendukuri, a 34-year-old, Ph.D. holder from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Achira will kick-start the pilot manufacturing process of its chip this year, with full-scale manufacturing expected to start in 2013. The team is also in the process of developing a fabric-based testing platform, using silk yarn to create an integrated fabric chip. 


Dendukuri believes that silk weaving can not only be used to build a low-cost, scalable platform for chip manufacture but can also create employment for the weavers. Funded by the Nadathur Group, Achira Labs has also received a grant of $1 million from Grand Challenges Canada last year. The funding will be utilised to further develop the fabric-based chip to make medical diagnostic tests. 

 Invictus Oncology & Vyome Biosciences 

Shiladitya Sengupta, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School's Brigham And Women's Hospital in the US, has cofounded three life sciences start-ups in India. Among them are Delhi-based firms Invictus Oncology and Vyome Biosciences. 

Invictus is developing nextgeneration anti-cancer drugs. The technology initially developed in Sengupta's lab at Harvard has been further developed by a group of scientists who have relocated to India. Among them are Monideepa Roy, who was teaching at Harvard Medical School, Dipankar Pramanik of Johns Hopkins, and Sajid Hussain of University of California. Sengupta says similar drugs in the US cost $9000 per dose and Indians cannot afford those nano-medicines. 

His other start-up Vyome Biosciences, which addresses skin diseases, was started in late 2010 by him and Rajesh Gokhale of Delhi-based Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology. The company has already filed patents both in India and the US. It has received seed funding from Navam Capital. 

Jai Medica 
 Sanjay Kakkar is the founder of this personalised healthcare venture that has developed a simple saliva-based test to determine how prone a person is to a heart attack or coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. The country's first ever genetic test to check the risk of heart disease is important at a time when India is witnessing an epidemic of CHD, with three million deaths per year and approximately 12% of the population affected annually.

Kakkar, an alumnus of Harvard University and King's College, University of London, was born and raised in the UK. After stints at big drug-makers Novartis and Pfizer, he built and managed Trigen, a UK-based biotechnology company. He led it, from starting off as a spin-out from a research institute into a free-standing business, until it was acquired. Then he relocated to India.

Mitra Biotech 

It's all about the correct diagnoses, according to Pradip Majumder, chief scientific officer and a co-founder of Mitra Biotech, a Bangalore-based bio-technology company engaged in developing personalised cancer therapy.

Founded in 2008 by a team of Harvard and MIT researchers, Mitra has developed a technology that allows doctors to predict which drugs might work and which won't for a cancer patient, based on the characteristics the tumour.

This also spares patients on whom the drugs might not work from their toxic side-effects. In parallel, Mitra is accumulating a database of 'market-sets' or types of patients whose tumours respond to specific drug combinations. A study has found that nearly six lakh Indians die of cancer every year, with 70% of these deaths between the ages of 30-69 years.

Mitra has already established linkages with the Mazumder-Shaw Cancer Centre and Healthcare Global Enterprises. Separately, the company is also partnering pharmaceutical companies to bring down the cost of cancer treatment drugs and improve their drug development. The company is backed by global venture capital firm Accel Partners, Karnataka Information Technology Venture Capital Fund and India Innovation Fund. 

Strand Lifesciences 

Vijay Chandru is the co-founder and chief executive of Bangalore-based bioinformatics firm Strand Life Sciences. His firm's latest innovation is a virtual liver - a predictive method that integrates data and insights for deeper understanding of the impact of a drug on the liver. The platform can predict toxicity of several known drugs and toxins.

Sengupta of Invictus Oncology says there is a great need for India to develop a network where academic institutions, industrial partners and catalyst funds can partner to take the innovations to market. "Being a scientist is not about just doing bench research but translating research into practice," he says.