India Health Fund (IHF), a Tata Trusts initiative, announced the on-boarding of two start-ups – AI-driven, TrakItNow Technologies and, affordable TB rapid testing creators, Stellar Diagnostics (SDIL) – to its portfolio of innovations. IHF will support the development and deployment of affordable, breakthrough innovations, point-of-care health technologies and digital innovations to prevent, control, and join hands to tackle infectious diseases.

With TrakItNow Technologies and Stellar Diagnostics, IHF continues to bridge the gap at various stages of innovation by validating, adapting existing solutions to support multi-disease platform innovations, and deploying these to achieve patient outcomes.

Madhav Joshi, CEO, India Health Fund, said, “We are identifying and supporting breakthrough innovations like tech-enabled surveillance, diagnostics and other point of care solutions that define the way forward in tackling infectious diseases. TrakItNow is an IoT and artificial intelligence based solution in development stage with immense potential to impact mosquito borne diseases and Stellar Diagnostics is working on a first of its kind triaging molecular diagnostic tool for diagnosing tuberculosis, the format of which can be used for other diseases when ready.”

Satish Cherukumalli, Co-Founder & CEO, TrakItNow, said, “Mosquito-borne diseases infect four crore people every year, and 95 per cent of population in India resides in malaria endemic areas. Moskeet platform collects real-time data and provides analytics for effective control of mosquito-populations, disease outbreak risk analysis and pesticide effectiveness. IHF support helps to expand the solution capabilities to major medically relevant mosquito species in India covering diseases like malaria, dengue, chikungunya, filaria and Japanese encephalitis.”

Dr Suman Laal, Chief Scientific Officer, SDIL, said, “IHF is supporting Stellar Diagnostics India in the development of an innovative, affordable, lateral-flow POC TB triage test that detects antibodies to specific and sensitive peptides of TB. Implementation of the triage test will enable TB control programmes to direct their limited resources towards providing increased access to accurate molecular diagnostic TB tests.”