By Anil Nair
India’s healthcare road map faces formidable hurdles—the largest population on earth, vast and diverse in its spread, and systemic challenges in providing basic healthcare. As opposed to a growing concentration of well-funded urban private hospitals, we have under-resourced public health facilities catering to 65% of the population in “rurban” areas. It’s obvious that democratising healthcare in India needs a biotech surge as much as a health-tech boom.
Healthtech as the digital backbone
Government healthtech initiatives like eSanjeevani, which has supported 12 crore tele-consultations, and private telemedicine platforms are serving as a digital bridge so that patients don’t have to travel several kilometres. It also addresses the shortage of doctors in rural areas.
Considering the expenses that the population still has to bear directly, other government-led initiatives like electronic health records under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and Centres of Excellence for artificial intelligence (AI) to promote AI-powered diagnostics and solutions reveal a forward-thinking mindset. Other digitisation initiatives like vaccination records and services under the U-Win portal, e-Hospital to connect patients with hospitals and doctors on one platform, and e-Bloodbank are maturing fast.
Biotech as the game-changer
Biotech will give healthtech wings. While the healthtech system provides the digital infrastructure to widen reach, the true potential of the healthcare system and its quality and effectiveness can only be actualised concurrently with a robust biotech ecosystem. It will help India progress beyond primary care involving basic symptom analysis to detection of diseases and genetic and other disorders at scale. It will help us get beyond trial-and-error treatments that increase costs and affect outcomes adversely.
Indigenous biotech research and development can help us create biosimilars, vaccines, and targeted therapies accessible to the masses. The combination of healthtech and biotech can ignite a major shift from reactive to proactive care. A rural health worker using a healthtech app connected to a portable biotech appliance leveraging bioinformatics can reveal patterns that were not apparent earlier. Similarly, information conveyed via wearables processed through AI algorithms can reveal susceptibilities that were latent before. Processing this data at scale could even reveal the potential onset of a crisis, enabling proactive interventions.
That the subject of biotech came up in the Lok Sabha recently is interesting. Jitendra Singh, minister for state for science and technology, informed the House on July 30 that India has set up 94 biotech incubators across the country, investing about `490 crore since 2012. Emerging regional clusters to nurture research and entrepreneurship in biotech include Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Telangana, each with more than 10 incubators. Institutions like the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council are further strengthening the ecosystem by provide support to start-ups in this space.
Biotech finds extensive use in healthcare—gene editing utilises it to correct genetic defects and treat disorders like viral infections and cancers, and genomics uses it to identify mutations that drive growth of tumors and tailor remediation. It is also applied in messenger RNA therapeutics (a class of medicines that instruct cells to produce particular proteins to combat specific diseases) and in biomanufacturing (involving the use of micro-organisms and cell cultures to produce essential medicines like insulin and vaccines at commercial scale).
Gene therapies now address much more complex conditions and deliver genetic material directly into the patient. With AI, every stage of drug discovery is being accelerated, and with the vastly enhanced ability to study enormous data sets, personalised drug regimens can now be created. Virtual clinical trials are already a reality. Micro-engineered chips can mimic human organs and tissue engineering has changed the paradigm in relation to tissue repair or replacement.
Innovations in biotech have also gone beyond healthcare. For instance, biotech finds use in agriculture to develop insect-resistant strains, crops with additional nutrition, and those with reduced vulnerability to salinity or drought conditions. As for industry, research in biotech is helping create microorganisms to tackle pollution and biofuels from plant biomass that reduce fossil fuel dependence, as well as developing biodegradable plastics. And now, bio-convergence is blurring the lines between AI, biology, classical engineering, and computing.
Global collaboration and converging intent are imperatives. Academia, industry, and governments must come together, unfettered, so that populations across the globe can benefit from dramatic advancements in healthcare. Sharing anonymised patient information will accelerate research and new solutions. Regulatory harmonisation will enable specialist consultations across nations.
We must find ways for life changing biotech innovations to make the greatest global impact, riding on the healthtech highway.
The writer is founder, ThinkStreet.
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