IIT Madras and Trivitron Health Care, a medical technology manufacturing company, on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on joint research for the development of indigenous biomedical devices.
The MoU will take up in the initial phase basic research on developing device prototypes in critical care, renal care, laboratory diagnostics and imaging sciences.
Trivitron will establish an exclusive innovation centre and research house in the Department of Engineering Design at IIT. The company will invest over Rs. 2 crore in the start-up phase besides committing about 15-20 per cent of its profits for the research initiative in the next few years.
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“We expect to bring out cost-effective medical technology products that would cater to patient needs in India and the emerging markets across the world,” said G.S.K. Velu, Trivitron managing director.
The industry-academia partnership, which will also involve students from various engineering streams, is optimistic of coming out with the first line of patent-protected medical technology products in a couple of years.
M. S. Ananth, IIT-M Director, said the collaboration reflected a long-felt aspiration to achieve the best in innovation through “bringing unlike minds together.” He pointed out that the primary reason why the US was the greatest innovator was the intrinsically heterogeneous nature of its immigrant population. Diversity was also one of India's strengths though there had to be an effort towards “mixing minds more consciously.”
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The academia-industry collaboration would also partly address the lacuna of engineering and medicine staying apart from each other. The IIT-M which had set up a research park with this ethos of innovation already has medical professors as adjunct faculty though the scale of converging the two streams through this measure was limited, he said. “Through this interaction, we hope to evolve models that can be replicated across other departments,” he said.
K. R. Balakrishnan, Director, Cardiac Sciences, Fortis Malar Hospital said a synergy of science, manufacturing and marketing of local technologies would help provide affordable healthcare by reducing dependence on imported devices.
R. Krishna Kumar, Head of the department of engineering design and coordinator of the innovation centre, said the research would follow international benchmarks in design process and reliability testing.