Pandorum Technologies puts onus on medical startups to bring in indigenous solutions to problems

BENGALURU: The recent success of Pandorum Technologies, which engineered an artificial liver tissue using 3D printing, has put the onus on medical startups sector to deliver in 2016. The startups are working in diverse areas such as cancer detection, defibrillators, diabetes care, genome technologies and various medical devices and are aiming to bring in indigenous solutions to problems.

“Indian med-tech startups can potentially produce indigenous solutions to local problems at a significantly lower cost, both addressing unmet clinical needs and also coming up with novel and affordable solutions for established clinical needs. This means more point-of-care screening, monitoring and diagnostic devices,” said Nishant Kumar, founder of Embryyo, a Pune- based medical devices and healthcare solutions startup, which is presently working on a device for tuberculosis monitoring and a computer assisted surgery technology, among others.

Bengaluru-based Axilor Ventures believes that the time is right for entrepreneurial disruption in the healthcare sector and has launched an innovation challenge — Healiate — in association with Narayana Health and the Department of Biotechnology’s C-CAMP.

“Unlike other popular sectors where there are enough entrepreneurs working on interesting problems, the primary challenge in healthcare is to create a strong pipeline of entrepreneurs and improve the number of experiments,” said Ganapathy Venugopal, cofounder of Axilor Ventures.