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Start-ups Receive Grants Of 65 Lacs Each Under Pfizer’s INDovation Program

Program partners Pfizer Limited, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog, Social Alpha, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), IIT-Delhi and AGNIi, with UN Health Innovation Exchange (UNHIEX) as the knowledge partner, have chosen six winners for the  Pfizer INDovation incubation initiative for healthcare start-ups. The focus is on oncology and digital health, because of the increasing burden of cancer in India and the emerging use of digital health to ensure better patient outcomes.  The six winners who will be given a grant of Rs. 65 lacs each will receive incubation support from AIM, NITI Aayog and IIT Delhi. Pfizer will provide the grant as well as mentorship and technical assistance to the start-ups and Social Alpha will provide program acceleration support.

This incubation program, launched in April 2022, which will run for two years, will help to accelerate the lab-to-market journey of these winning startups. Apart from the grant, this support will include product engineering and development services, clinical validation guidance, regulatory advisory, identification of market access opportunities and catalytic cross-industrial collaborations.

Speaking about this program, Mr S. Sridhar, Managing Director, Pfizer Limited, said, “At Pfizer, we strongly believe in innovations and breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. I am very impressed by the ingenuity of the solutions proposed by the winning start-ups. Each one of these has the potential to significantly enhance healthcare delivery. I am confident that through the grants and the incubation support that each will receive from the program partners, the six winners will quickly and smoothly convert their brilliant ideas into commercially successful products and solutions that can help patients lead better lives.”

Commenting on the winning teams, Dr. Chintan Vaishnav, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, said, “I congratulate the winners of INDovation and wish them great success in the future. I am also pleased to note that the one thing all six winners have in common is that their solutions can contribute towards the National Digital Health Mission. The increased burden of cancer in India and poor prognosis because of delayed intervention, can be controlled through innovative digital health solutions.”

The winners under “Digital Health” category include BrainSight Technologies Pvt Ltd.’s Voxel Box that uses an AI-based computational engine to extract brain connectivity and activity patterns, and hard-to-understand structural features, as well as temporally dynamic symptoms. RAMJA Genosensor provides a rapid, easy, and cost-effective novel paper-based device to detect microbial infection and antimicrobial resistance in less than 2 hours. AI Health Highway India Pvt Ltd.’s Ai-Steth is a smart stethoscope to screen, detect and predict heart and lung disorders using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Under “Oncology”, Oncophenomics Life Sciences Pvt Ltd. has developed a tumour-informed liquid biopsy CGP test that helps circumvent the issues of non-approachable biopsy regions. Pragmatech Healthcare Solutions Pvt.’s CERVICHECK™ Kit provides a clinically conclusive and comprehensive solution for effective preventive cervical cancer screening implementation in a low resource setting, by addressing India-centric challenges of low-recall and drop-outs. Tera Lumen Solutions Pvt Ltd. has developed a non-invasive imaging device that can detect accurate cancer margins intraoperatively and rapidly (within ten minutes of surgery).

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