Vinay Kumar lived in a remote village in western UP where the health facilities were not up to the mark. He was diagnosed with a chronic condition called juvenile diabetes at the age of 14 when his mother noticed that he was losing weight. He was required to take daily insulin injections to manage his illness. But there was no doctor or testing facility in his village. The only doctor available was two-and a-half hours away from his village. No one in his family had even heard about juvenile diabetes until that point.
Similar to Vinay, millions of people suffer from diabetes and 1.6 million deaths are attributed directly to the chronic disease each year globally. It causes serious health issues, including blindness, foot amputations, heart attacks, chronic anaemia and kidney failures. Doctor advised Vinay to leave school but it was his mother who was determined to get her son good education. Vinay’s childhood experiences taught him the importance of science and motivated him to pursue research in public health and chronic disease diagnostics — including diabetes, kidney failure,anaemia and protein deficiencies. He went on to do his MSc from Kurukshetra University and later completed his PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
It was in Bengaluru that he got the idea to eventually set up PathShodh Healthcare — a company incubated at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE) at the prestigious IISc. Their bio-sensing device which can measure multiple parameters related to diabetes, chronic kidney disease and anaemia and malnutrition or protein deficiencies is called AnuPath. This on-thespot test does not need special storage conditions or sample/reagent preparation and is ultra-low cost — 80% cheaper than conventional testing methods. The technology makes it simple to do some of the important tests related to diabetes and Chronic Kidney Disease. The test is done by simply collecting blood/urine sample and putting it onto the strips, removing all intermediate steps. Also, the technology makes these tests very quick; it requires only one minute for each test. The technology is based on dry test strip and not on any enzymatic or immunoassay-based technology, thus making it very robust to changes in temperature and humidity. The high-tech and high-quality device has met International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and European safety standards. Anupath has already been used to screen lakhs of people in India. And now, in response to the ongoing pandemic, PathShodh Healthcare has made a significant breakthrough in developing a first-of-its-kind, semiquantitative electrochemical ELISA test for COVID-19 IgM and IgG antibodies. PathShodh has received the icense to manufacture the test for sale from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), after due validation at the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad, as per the requirements of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). According to Vinay Kumar, CEO and co-founder of PathShodh, “This novel technology can detect COVID-19 antibodies all the way down to the nanomolar concentration. It can work with venous or capillary (finger-prick) whole blood sample as well as serum sample.
