When a patient fights an ailment

1. When a Patient Fights an
Ailment
Vinay Kumar nearly died of diabetes and then single-mindedly
pursued a product to monitor the disease, writes Hari Pulakkat
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2. Contd…
Vinay Kumar woke in the operation theatre, not knowing why he was there. He had
passed out in his office cafeteria after taking his insulin shots and waiting for his
food to arrive. Now, in the operation theatre of a hospital, Gurgaon, he found three
masked faces staring at him. One of the faces asked for his phone number. “He is all
right,“ another face said as he gave the number correctly. Vinay managed to
survive, but the incident changed his life forever. What he did since then could
change the life of millions of diabetics around the world.
When he fainted Vinay Kumar was 27 years old, and had been living with insulin-
dependent diabetes for 13 years. He was a chip designer with two master's degrees
and two gold medals, both achieved while struggling through life with the
complications of his disease. After his near-death experience, he understood the
complications of diabetes. He learned that the disease progresses quickly, and it is
necessary to stop damage to vital organs early. “I wanted to find a way to detect
the damage early,“ says Vinay. After exploring diabetes research in Indian
institutions, he wrote to Navakanta Bhat of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in
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3. Contd….
Bhat is a professor at the Nanoscience Centre at IISc. An electrical engineer with a PhD from
Stanford University, he had spent a few years in industrial R&D before returning to academics. In
IISc, he started working on sensors and had a PhD student work on a blood glucose sensor. It was
this work that attracted Vinay, who knew from his own research that there was no quick, cheap and
reliable way of measuring vital markers of disease progression in diabetes. Vinay moved to IISc first
as a project assistant, started a PhD on the topic of sensors, and finished his degree in just two
years. Now, Bhat and Vinay -along with a former colleague of his -have started a company to make
diabetes monitoring products, which IISc assesses to have big potential over the next few years.
Bhat had been toying with starting a company for a while, as he had seen entrepreneurship from
close quarters while at Stanford. He had considered making healthcare products because he saw
the need for cheap diagnosis in the country. Around that time, he also met KR Krishnaswamy, a
biochemist who had managed Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai and then founded and managed Mallya
Hospital in Bangalore. Krishnaswamy had a lifelong interest in disease markers, and specifically on
how sugar in the blood transforms proteins. He advised Bhat on the biochemistry of diabetes.“The
promise of new rapid diagnostic methods is extraordinary,“ says Krishnaswamy. “And I am convinced
of the business potential.“
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4. Contd…
So the seeds of a company had already been laid in Bhat's mind, but the arrival of
Vinay accelerated the development. For someone so young, Vinay had unusual
clarity of purpose. He had already suffered diabetes for some time before it was
diagnosed by a doctor in the nearby town of Saharanpur. Then followed a period of
trial and error, occasional fainting and severe discomfort even as he went through
his school and college with distinction. “He was an unusual student,“ says Vakul
Bansal, his physics professor at SV Jain College in Saharanpur. “He went to great
lengths to understand a concept well.“
Vinay wanted to be a physicist, but Bansal had talked him out of it, advising to take
up a more practical subject instead. Vinay made a compromise, choosing a master's
degree in electronics. When he wanted to do a PhD in electronics, Bansal once
again advised him to pursue an M-Tech instead. It landed Vinay a job quickly, just as
Bansal had expected. But he had wide interests. “He has a passion for science,“ says
SS Srikanta, endocrinologist and former fellow of Harvard Medical School and now
medical director of Samatvam Trust in Bangalore.“It has made him venture into
fields that do not belong to him.“ Brought to you by
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5. Contd…
Blood sugar-testing is now universal, and can be easily done at home using widely-available
kits.But their accuracies do not match those of tests done in a pathology lab. Blood sugar,
in any case, is only one of the markers of diabetes. More sophisticated tests cannot be
done at home, and are not cheap even in a pathology lab. The expensive test of Glycated
haemoglobin, or HbA1C, needs to be done frequently for diabetics. Other indicators like
microalbumin -an early sign of kidney damage -are more difficult and expensive, and have
never been miniaturised to be done at home.
Bhat and Vinay set out to develop a machine that can do several tests accurately, cheaply
and quickly. “India has no foundry to make silicon-based products,“ says Bhat, “and so I was
forced to look at other areas.“ For his PhD, Vinay started work on new chemistry to sense
biomolecules. The technique they investigated, called electrochemistry, is widely used to
detect metallic compounds that are electrochemically active. Electrochemistry was not
useful for electrically inactive biological molecules. Very quickly, Vinay and Bhat developed
a process to convert biomolecules to a form that is electrochemically active. It gave them a
method to detect these molecules accurately. All they had to do was measure a current
that increases and decreases with the amount of the molecule.
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6. Contd…
The rest followed quickly. Bhat took leave from work and formed PathShodh,
with offices inside the entrepreneurship centre at IISc. They got money from
the government to do the development, under the Biotechnology Ignition
Grant and other schemes. Bhat's brother Sameer Bhat, a US-based
entrepreneur who founded the electronic records company eClinicalWorks,
became an angel investor in PathShodh. The company has a handheld device
that can test five markers of diabetes progression quickly, by putting a drop
of blood on a strip and inserting it into the machine.
The product will be ready to be launched in a few months. Navakanta Bhat
wants to aim at the US market as well as the Indian market. “A lot of patients
in the US would like to get a device like this,“ says Sameer Bhat. The market
for point-of-care testing is wide open all over the world.
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