Dr Geetha Manjunath, CEO of the Bengaluru based Niramai Health Analytix has been awarded BioSpectrum Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2020 for her strategic steps that make the company stand out in the the crowd and ability to raise funds as an entrepreneur in 2019-20 at a virtual ceremony held in March 2021. The ceremony witnessed the participation of over 200 industry leaders from across the country.

With the skills acquired from IISc and from Kellogg’s School of Management, Chicago and garnering technical experience working in IT research and heading many innovative projects for over 25 years in Healthcare and Transportation, Dr Geetha turned entrepreneur in 2016 by starting Niramai Health Analytix. Under her leadership and guidance, the company has raised around $7 million from investors and has developed a novel breast cancer screening solution that uses Thermalytix, i.e. machine intelligence over thermography images. The company has developed technology for non-touch, non-invasive breast cancer screening for women. Niramai claims it can detect tumours five years before they can be detected using mammography. As said by Anna Maria Kinberg Batra, Prominent Leader of Sweden, Niramai has great opportunities to improve women’s lives and health around the world, using technology and AI.

In her acceptance speech, Dr Geetha said, “The team is striving very hard to create this new method of detecting breast cancer in a very private manner using AI images. So far we have 34,000 screenings and about 15 cities, 70+ installations working with Apollo Clinic, HCG as well as screened 2000+ outreach camps. Moving forward we want to be established in every city in India with partners. In addition, we want to take this beyond India and are on our way to get a CE mark, which will enable us to go to Europe and several other Asian countries and of course to the US later.” 

Besides the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award, a panel of the jury chaired by Dr Renu Swarup Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, has selected other awards namely – Life Time Achievement Award, Entrepreneur of the year award, Business Person of the year Award and Product of the year award at a meeting held at her office in February 2020.

The jury panel includes Utkarsh Palnitkar, Founder & Managing Partner, Aarna Corporate Advisors, US; Dr Gagandeep Kang, the then Executive Director, Translational Health Science & Technology Institute (THSTI), New Delhi (she is now Professor of Microbiology, at the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, Division of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore); Deepanwita Chattopadhyay, Chairperson and CEO, IKP Knowledge Park, Hyderabad; and Dr Bhagirath Choudhary, Board member of APEDA, Ministry of Commerce & Industry and Founder Director, South Asia Biotechnology Centre (SABC), New Delhi.  

Talking about the BioSpectrum Excellence Awards 2020, Ravi Boratkar, Managing Editor and Publisher, BioSpectrum India, MM Activ Sci-Tech Communications, New Delhi said “BioSpectrum awards as we know were constituted in 2003. 

Unfortunately, the awards ceremony was discontinued in between. However, we used to receive queries and calls. Finally, in 2019, we decided to keep up this good work and acknowledging, appreciating and awarding the exemplary work of individuals and companies in the respective fields with these awards. The actual BioSpectrum Awards Ceremony was organised at The LaLiT Ashok Bangalore, on March 27, 2020. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to cancel the ceremony. We hoped to do it at a later date. However now we realised that it will be a time for next year’s award. So we decided to go virtually. Hence we thought let’s come together and do this programme virtually.”