Pune-based Vidcare Technologies, which has developed a credit-card-sized chip to revolutionise how blood testing is being performed, has acquired pre-seed funding of $300K in the last week of August. Called Mu-sure, the technology will first be deployed in the testing of hypothyroidism in people, especially women during pregnancy.
“We had realised that there was almost no way to carry out blood tests outside of a centralised lab and get results easily and intuitively at home. One of the outcomes was that since a lot of people, especially in rural India, were unwilling to travel to a lab or or nearby health centres for tests, a lot of medical conditions and illnesses were not diagnosed,” says Rohan Aggarwal, who founded Vidcare in 2017 with Karan Aggarwal and Saurabh Kumar Srivastava.
Mu-sure is designed as “an equipment-free blood diagnostic platform”. “The entire test fits in a disposable, credit card-sized self-contained chip without compromising test accuracy. All you need is the Mu-sure chip. Add your sample, wait 20 minutes, and read the results as you do on a thermometer. With the help of a mobile phone, you can digitise the results to share with your doctor,” adds Aggarwal. The decision to roll out Mu-sure to test for hypothyroidism was based on conversations with patients, physicians and other stakeholders.
Hypothyroidism is one of the main causes of birth complications as well as development disorders in children globally. According to an article in The Lancet (2014), 42 million people in India suffer from thyroid disorders, with hypothyroidism being the most common, affecting one in 10 adults in the country. “Mu-sure ensures that even an untrained person can easily use the test,” says Aggarwal.
The money raised through the recent funding will be used to take the product to the market and make it available to various public health institutions, companies that work in public health, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes. “We also intend to use the same technology to develop further applications with the focus being on national diseases. The aim is to ensure preventive care as patients can carry out tests at their own convenience,” adds Aggarwal.
