Digital India makes a Healthy India

Healthcare in India is plagued by the iron triangle of access, affordability, and quality of care. COVID-19 has further highlighted the gaps in the system and the chasm between urban and rural and also the rich and the poor. This is where digital health has emerged as a pivotal intervention in delivering value-based care across the healthcare continuum in India. Adaptive intelligent solutions can reduce the barrier between hospitals and patients, improving access to care and enhancing overall patient satisfaction. Novel health technologies such as wearables, genomics, virtual reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence are changing India’s healthcare landscape.

At Menterra Ventures we believe in the need to encourage and invest in such digital health start-ups. To do so, we recently launched a digital health challenge and had around 75+ very interesting, early-stage start-ups in the digital health space. Here is a peek into some of these companies and their role in creating a healthy India.??

• Logy AI : screening for cataracts, just a click away?

An estimated 95 million people worldwide are affected by cataracts. Cataract still remains the leading cause of blindness in middle-income and low-income countries. India has a large number of blinds requiring sight-restoring cataract surgery. Despite the increase in service availability and heightened outreach screening efforts, blindness has not decreased and uptake of offered cataract surgery services is suboptimal. One of the major reasons why cataract is left undetected for a significant segment of the population is because of the weak screening methods available today through costly eye camps that use slit lamps, operated by trained ophthalmologists. Organizing eye camps requires money, effort, and most importantly, the precious time of the ophthalmologist hence scaling them is very difficult. Logy AI 's approach of taking a picture of the eye using an android phone and then using AI to screen for cataracts can replace the eye camps of today. As a result, screening in large numbers, at low costs, and at tremendous speeds is possible. With scaled-up screening, greater chances of detecting those with cataracts and solving that through a simple surgery. Logy AI has the potential to significantly improve the affordability and accessibility of cataract screening, especially in remote and underserved geographies where organizing eye camps is challenging, leading to treatment and ultimately eliminating needless blindness.?

• Comofi Medtech Pvt Ltd : making kidney stone removal, easier

Between 1% and 15% of people globally are affected by kidney stones at some point in their lives. In 2015, 22.1 million cases occurred, resulting in about 16,100 deaths. There are various treatments possible, but widely used methods are PCNL and RIRS surgeries that are minimally invasive. This company proposes that with their software and hardware, PCNL and RIRS surgeries will be accessible and affordable. Their surgery intervention platform uses preoperative and intraoperative data for better intervention planning. Surgeons are likely to benefit from the increased cognitive performance and work efficiency. The powerful image processing tools and robotic accuracy provides intervention at critical steps during surgery to improve the surgical outcome. Their thesis is that such surgeries are done by limited endo urologists in tier 3 towns and hence patients from here need to move to tier 2 towns and hence will need to incur extra costs on account of higher surgery costs, travel, living, etc. This they believe will lead to affordability. Similarly, if more surgeries get done in tier 3 towns by those endo urologists not currently doing surgeries considering the risks in puncturing, accessibility could also improve. There are also strong indications that the quality of surgeries can improve due to reduced blood losses, faster healing, etc.?

• Peptris Technologies : making drug discovery, faster & cheaper

Peptris Technologies designs and develops neural network architectures to predict important properties of biological molecules. Peptris Technologies claims to have curated millions of data points including structure, annotations, and properties data of proteins, molecules, and interactions from public data sources. These learned representations of proteins and molecules from pre-trained multi-task networks enable them to predict binding affinities of the protein-small molecule and protein-protein interactions. This makes it possible to accelerate discovery, lead optimization, toxicity, and specificity predictions with unparalleled precision and accuracy. Peptris Technologies partners with pharma companies to solve ailments that are prevalent in the third world. The company is focused on creating novel therapies in the inflammation and oncology space. They are innovating around oncology therapies that can impact up to 40% of cancer cases in India. Additionally, 60 to 80% of patients in India and south Asian countries present with advanced disease as compared to 40% in developed countries. The company also aims to focus on rare diseases where treatments are very costly. Significant impact can also be created if the company were to focus on developing drugs for neglected tropical infectious diseases. Such diseases are responsible for substantial morbidity and mortality in the developing world and have a clear economic burden on the affected countries.

Logy AI , Comofi Medtech Pvt Ltd & Peptris Technologies represent those rising stars in the digital health space. Their boldness, patience, and determination need appreciation. They are also joined by hundreds of other impactful start-ups with the potential to make a healthy India. Menterra Ventures wishes them the best in their journey!

Authored by - Paul Basil , Co-Founder & Head-Impact Menterra Ventures