BENGALURU: IIT-Madras Director Bhaskar Ramamurthy inaugurated an incubation cell that will support doctoral students from the institution’s biotechnology department. This incubation cell will help researchers who have in depth knowledge but lack resources, like G Purushothaman and Kiran Kumar, reports TNN.

Researchers of IIT Madras, G Purushothaman and Kiran Kumar started a venture to invent a technology for the doctors to treat patients with infectious disease and it was very promising too. But after two of tears, 4 young researchers decided to start a different mission to develop point of care-testing device that would take a single check for multiple infectious diseases like TB, HIV and Hepatitis B. This led the team shrunk into two.

Government of India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council supported this initiative. This incubation cell aims to help startups and small and medium enterprises develop products and make them successful commercially. Shrikumar Srinarayan IIT-Madras alumnus and CEO of Sea6 Energy, a group formed by few IIT-Madras graduates, said that support of institution was important. He said, “ IIT students come up with brilliant ideas and then they burn out. It’s cruel world. This is a safe environment; that’s why it’s called a bio-incubattor.”

According to Suryanarayan, this kind of support was uncommon in Biotechnology.

The bio-incubator will create a nurturing environment for innovation and encourage commercialization of promising discoveries. It will offer lab and office space with sophisticated equipment and centralized utilities for process and product development to help technologies mature and attain commercialization. The bio incubator is also supporting other projects like Fib-sol life technologies for developing low-cost biofertilisers, and vital Bioscientific solutions, that is working on a model to stimulate a system’s reaction to a drug. It is also backing Yaathum Biotech, which is producing diagnostic kits to identify a full range of drug resistant tuberculosis strains with a single test.

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