Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ropar is collaborating with IIT Mandi and PGIMER, Chandigarh to establish a Bio-X Consortium, which will address all big challenges in the fields of healthcare and medicine. All three institutes have inked a 3-way MoU to focus on disease prevention and affordable health care in India.
The consortium is the brainchild of Prof. S.K Das, director of IIT Ropar who initiated this project along with the Prof. Timothy A. Gonsalves, director, IIT Mandi, and PGIMER, Chandigarh. The objective is to facilitate collaboration between engineering and technological experts to develop low cost diagnostics and therapy for prevalent diseases which affects a large number of people in India.
Bio-X consortium is poised to tackle the complex challenges in medicine with an interdisciplinary outlook. Based on the common strengths of the collaborating institutes, current focus areas of the consortium include biomedical imaging, biomechanics, biomedical nanotechnology, biomedical instrumentation and cancer diagnostics & therapy.
Both the directors of IIT Ropar and Mandi have agreed to support the consortium by providing the required seed money in form of grants, contributing to 10% of the total project cost. The seed funding will be given to projects with significant potential to initiate preliminary study opportunities and also at a later stage attract additional external funding.
Currently 3 out of the 6 projects presented during initial discussions have been awarded seed grants totalling to Rs. 48 lakh. The three projects are in the field of Developing low cost low magnetic field MRI; Determination of Mechanical and Biological Osteoporotic Bone; & Surface modified upconversion nanoparticles for theranostic applications in cancer. All three projects are progressing smoothly with preliminary work/experiments underway and are expecting to apply for extramural funding within one year.
Speaking about the collaboration, Prof. Das, said, “This consortium is a result of months of discussions and meetings between the institutes. We aimed to develop a conglomerate or a system, where we could encourage the technological talent and experts to develop affordable medical devices and diagnostic therapies for the various wide spread diseases in India. The success of this consortium will bring a revolution in medical technology and we will enable us to provide low cost healthcare & diagnostics to the large population of India.”