Oncology, digital health startups to receive Rs 65 lakh grant under Pfizer’s INDovation Programme

To accelerate the lab-to-market journey of the 6 winning startups

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Programme 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 announced the six winners of the first edition of Pfizer INDovation incubation initiative for healthcare startups.

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 lakh 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 startups and Social Alpha will provide program acceleration support. 

The winners under “Digital Health” category include BrainSight Technologies' 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'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 has developed a tumour-informed liquid biopsy CGP test that helps circumvent the issues of non-approachable biopsy regions. Pragmatech Healthcare Solutions' 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 has developed a non-invasive imaging device that can detect accurate cancer margins intraoperatively and rapidly (within ten minutes of surgery).

Published on : 13th September, 2022