Innov4Sight and Biomedical Systems start-up focusing on cancer analytics is currently looking to raise US$ 1.5 million. The company is gearing up to commercialise its two products Parsight and XPerienceRX.
While Parsight is an integrated big data analysis engine with search capability, XPerienceRX is a healthcare simulation device which according to the company could become India’s largest ready reckoner for cancer analysis.
“We are currently in the middle of a ‘pre-Series A’ round seeking about $1.5 million. This round will help us move our research work to commercialisation,” Vijaygopal Rengarajan, founder and CEO, Innov4Sight Health and Biomedical Systems told Pharmabiz.
Over the past 5 years, health-tech focussed funds have grown multi-fold. But the year 2016 has not been good for health-tech start-ups seeking seed & early stage fund raising, he added.
A few large hospitals which have automated medical records and health information systems can definitely benefit from cancer analytics. The reality is that a majority of the hospitals and research centres dedicated to cancer care are still in the process of adopting health IT systems. It will take another 3-5 years before cancer analytics will have a large-scale impact at the national level. However, it will be essential for appropriate policies to drive the adoption of digital medical records to eventually help implementation of analytics, said Rengarajan.
Now ParSight is ready for its first implementation at a Nashik-based cancer hospital to tabulate over 3,00,000 anonymized medical records by the year-end. For Xperience Rx which is a learning management system (LMS) software, we partnered with BlackBoard. Our commercial roll-out is in progress and we hope to work with other popular LMS products like Moodle, & Canvas, he said.
Both Parsight and XPerienceRX are developed for SAARC & ASEAN markets. The company has collaborations with Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and one of the departments at Tata Memorial Hospital. Besides, it is also associated with over 120 hospitals including Onco Lifecare Center, Prashanti Cancer Care Mission, Orchid Breast Cancer, Ruban Memorial Hospital, and Bellevue Hospital among others. It also recently signed-up a major deal with Curie Manavata Cancer Centre.
India is innovating. Health-tech companies in India are making tremendous progress in analytics and therapeutics but the lack of infrastructure and supporting policies are driving these innovations away from India, noted Rengarajan
The start-up ecosystem in India is good for a pure play IT companies. The glamour of working for start-ups has faded. It is not easy to hire talent although the best minds are attracted to the complexity of our solution and seek employment with us irrespective of the start-up challenges, he said.
ParSight & IBM’s Watson’s solution for cancer complement each other. ParSight focuses on building a repository of anonymized cancer records which will assist clinicians as a decision support system. Watson’s fetches knowledge from research publications as an evidence-based treatment option.