Posted by Mumbai: Tata Trusts backed India Health Fund (IHF) said two startups TrakItNow Technologies and Stellar Diagnostics (SDIL) have onboard its portfolio of innovations.
India Health Fund is a Tata Trusts led initiative with a collective vision to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) by 2025 and malaria by 2030 from India.
Hyderabad based TrakItNow Technologies provides Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled solutions across sectors, including public health for social impact. It focuses on solutions for public safety and connected vehicles.
SDIL is based out of the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad. SDIL is primarily involved in developing highly accurate and affordable diagnostic tests based on identified and patented peptides.
IHF will support the development and deployment of affordable health technologies and digital innovations to prevent, control and help to tackle infectious diseases.
With TrakItNow Technologies and Stellar Diagnostics, India Health Fund aims to bridge the gap at various stages of innovation by validating, adapting existing solutions and support multi-disease platform innovations.
“We are identifying and supporting breakthrough innovations like tech-enabled surveillance, diagnostics and other point of care solutions that define the way forward in tackling infectious diseases,” said Madhav Joshi, CEO – India Health Fund,
“TrakItNow is an IoT and artificial intelligence-based solution in the development stage with immense potential to impact mosquito-borne diseases. Stellar Diagnostics is working on a first of its kind triaging molecular diagnostic tool for diagnosing Tuberculosis – the format of which can be used for other diseases when ready,” added Joshi.
IHF’s efforts are in line with the objectives of the Government of India and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It aims to accelerate India’s progress towards the elimination of these infectious diseases.
IHF with its partners is adapting existing solutions to battle COVID-19. It is working towards faster integration of innovations into healthcare systems to tackle TB, vector-borne and airborne diseases.
TrakItNow Technologies’ smart mosquito surveillance and control system Moskeet — use IoT, AI and automated process to mitigate infectious diseases. Currently, Moskeet is the only holistic and scalable solution of mosquito surveillance that operates autonomously and provides real-time data both by location and species.
According to TrakItNow Co-Founder and CEO Satish Cherukumalli, mosquito-borne diseases infect 4 crore people every year, and 95% of population in India resides in malaria endemic areas. “Moskeet platform collects real-time data and provides analytics for effective control of mosquito-populations, disease outbreak risk analysis and pesticide effectiveness,” said Cherukumalli.
“IHF support helps to expand the solution capabilities to major medically relevant mosquito species in India covering diseases like malaria, dengue, chikungunya, filaria and Japanese Encephalitis,” added Cherukumalli.
With IHF’s support, SDIL is developing a novel TB solution that allows rapid, affordable testing in 20 minutes. This antibody-based point-of-care TB screening test requires no laboratory infrastructure and minimal health care workers’ training. IHF is enabling the improvement in test accuracy, through field trials in two phases needed for regulatory approval. And establish the test as rapid and affordable — by adapting it to finger-prick blood testing.
“IHF is supporting SDIL in the development of an innovative, affordable, lateral-flow POC TB Triage test that detects antibodies to specific and sensitive peptides of TB. Implementation of the Triage test will enable TB Control programs to direct their limited resources towards providing increased access to accurate molecular diagnostic TB tests,” said Dr Suman Laal, Chief Scientific Officer, SDIL.