iQuant: A Point-of-care Test-kit Analyser That's Made In India, For India

Over the years, innovators have been trying to create ways for digital and medical technologies to converge, to enable newer and better diagnostic solutions for the healthcare industry. The advances in the digital industry now provide the healthcare industry with tools that can be redesigned and re-engineered for more cost-effective solutions in the imaging and diagnostics space. Delhi-based J. Mitra & Company has been focusing on creating cost-effective and mobile solutions for the Indian medical industry. The company’s latest invention, the iQuant analyser, addresses the shortage of low cost medical test equipment in local diagnostic centres.

- Paromik Chakraborty

The dearth of low cost medical equipment often renders lo-cal medical centres incapable of providing quick test reports and medication to patients. Those that have the facilities, often charge high fees to patients because of the huge investments made in the diagnostic machines. Besides, the restricted availability of such facilities results in poor delivery of timely healthcare to semi-urban and rural areas. Time consuming procedures sometimes result in delays of up to 48 hours for generating reports. The lack of portable machines forces patients to travel to distant locations. And the complexity of the machines requires skilled personnel to run the tests, apart from the need for 24x7 electricity leading to higher operational costs for the medical centres. All these challenges motivated the J. Mitra team to design iQuant.

Jatin Mahajan, MD, J. Mitra, says, “My father, Lalit Mahajan, and I are research and innovation-driven people. We constantly deliberate on how we can make our solutions more affordable and accessible. Recognising the various shortfalls in India’s disease-detection and diagnostics system, we decided to work towards a solution that would reach out to the masses rather than the masses having to reach out to it.”

Mahajan and his team prepared their business blueprint and reached out to Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), a multidisciplinary R&D centre jointly set up by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India. They collaborated to create a point-of-care diagnostic instrument that could rapidly read quantitative test kits and provide a numerical value of the test results in less time. The R&D and design work by J. Mitra and HTIC led to the creation of iQuant.