A startup incubated at Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIT-H) has made it to the top-5 list from among 75 startups from India, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and the UK that took part in a competition held as part of BioAsia 2020 in Hyderabad.
The ‘Startup Stage’ contestants were short-listed from over 350 applications on the basis of the innovativeness of their products or solutions, development stage and market readiness.
The startup in question — Heamac Healthcare, incubated at the IIT-H’s Center for Healthcare Entrepreneurship (CfHE) — provides solution to neonatal jaundice management using an evolutionary phototherapy device called ‘nLite360’, which reduces by 70% the burden of the doctor struggling to treat every newborn with minimal resources available. It also reduces 35% of the total treatment time, say founders Prasad Muddam and Akitha Kolloju, who graduated from the unique one-year fellowship programme offered by the CfHE.
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Kolloju credited the achievement to the biodesign fellowship program at CfHE, where she was trained to identify the need in this segment. Highlighting the role of CfHE in developing such a start-up, IIT-H director B.S. Murty said centre has been a cradle of biomedical innovations with special focus on creating social impact by addressing unmet medical needs of the rural population.