Dr Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam is a Professor at IIT Madras and heads the Healthcare Know-how Innovation Centre (HTIC) in addition to the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Mind Centre.
Established in 2011, HTIC is a number one med-tech innovation ecosystem that brings collectively round 40 medical establishments, industries, and authorities companies to develop and deploy inexpensive healthcare applied sciences.
The Sudha Gopalakrishnan Mind Centre focuses on imaging whole human brains and is working in direction of producing the world’s most detailed cell-resolution human mind maps throughout the human lifespan, together with for varied mind ailments
A recipient of quite a few awards, Mohanasankar was just lately conferred with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar for ‘excellent and galvanizing’ contributions in science and expertise. He holds a B Tech diploma from Anna College, an MS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State College, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the College of California at Santa Cruz.
Mohanasankar spoke to indianexpress.com on his analysis pursuits, the pathbreaking work being finished by the centres he heads, the medtech ecosystem, and the challenges that startups face. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Inform us broadly about your analysis pursuits.
Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: I used to be skilled in implantable medical electronics. Throughout my PhD, I used to be lucky to work on one of the vital cutting-edge medical gadgets: electrically stimulating the retina to revive imaginative and prescient in blind sufferers. Due to that work, I had the chance to study throughout many different fields: electrophysiology, biomaterials, and neurophysiology. A lot of my understanding of neuroscience comes from that point.
I returned to India in 2008 and joined IIT Madras to do translational analysis. It means you do analysis, convert it into expertise, after which translate that expertise into merchandise by working with trade or startups. Broadly, my work is in healthcare applied sciences. I measure the affect of our work by the variety of sufferers we attain.
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Analysis-wise and publication-wise, our centre is among the main teams in India within the biomedical space.
Over the past 5 – 6 years, this path has additionally been formed by Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infosys, when he challenged us with the thought of whether or not we might create a ‘new science’ that will produce the applied sciences of tomorrow. This led to our work on the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Mind Centre on the intersection of neuroscience and engineering.
So at the moment, human mind sciences and neurotechnologies kind one other main space of my analysis, alongside healthcare applied sciences.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Inform us concerning the Healthcare Know-how Innovation Centre, its historical past and journey.
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Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: It’s now nearly 15 years since we began. The medtech incubator started in 2017.
After returning to India, I needed to work on medical gadgets and translate that work into the trade. However everybody was clear that such an ecosystem didn’t actually exist in India at the moment.
So we determined this couldn’t simply be a lab. It needed to be a centre. And never a centre centered solely on expertise. Healthcare is a type of messy sectors with many stakeholders: docs, hospitals, regulators, trade, sufferers, and society at massive. Know-how is just one a part of that system. So we created this centre to assist anchor that ecosystem.
The centre began in 2011 in a small 3,000-square-foot house. At the moment, it’s a 15,000-square-foot facility with each R&D and incubation.
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Our improvements have resulted in 14 commercially profitable merchandise, serving to two crore sufferers in India and overseas. Our medtech incubator has incubated greater than 60 healthtech startups.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: May you inform us about some fascinating improvements which have come out of the centre?
Prof Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: The primary product was a cell eye surgical unit for cataract surgical procedure, the primary time an working theatre was made cell.
One of many main causes of blindness in India is cataract. It’s stunning if you consider it, individuals going blind from one thing treatable. But the backlog for cataract surgical procedure in India may be very excessive.
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The problem isn’t simply affordability. The actual subject is entry. India has a peculiar healthcare problem: even when price is manageable, entry and high quality stay obstacles. Healthcare wants in India are a mix of affordability, entry, and high quality. At the moment, even in rural areas, individuals are conscious of high quality. That’s why individuals journey throughout states to locations like AIIMS or Tata Memorial Hospital.
That query of entry formed our first product. We designed a completely useful cell eye surgical unit. We then labored with the Ministry of Well being to acquire particular permission to conduct surgical procedures exterior a conventional hospital setting. Round 40,000-45,000 surgical procedures have been carried out utilizing these models, all in distant rural areas throughout varied states.
It was the primary success. After that, a collection of merchandise adopted.
We labored with Forus Well being, a Bengaluru-based firm, to deal with one other main subject: not sufficient docs in rural areas. India wants roughly
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100 million eye examinations per 12 months, however we have now solely about 15,000 ophthalmologists, most of them in cities.
Collectively, we developed two merchandise. The primary is a conveyable, absolutely digital grownup eye screening gadget that prices about one-third of present techniques. The intelligence is constructed into the software program, permitting it to be operated by a non-expert. Photos could be transmitted to a health care provider for distant evaluate, both in actual time or later. This product, known as 3nethra, is now utilized in round 2,500 places throughout 40-50 nations.
The second product is 3nethra Neo, designed for screening newborns for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). India has one of many highest numbers of untimely births, and ROP may cause blindness if not detected early. Present tools is pricey, starting from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore and requires specialists to function. Even when the tools had been free, entry would nonetheless be an issue as a result of there are only some hundred pediatric ophthalmologists within the nation. 3nethra Neo addresses this hole and has now screened over 4 million infants, and is used globally.
We additionally developed techniques for distant monitoring of newborns after hospital discharge — steady monitoring of temperature and general well being. This was piloted in a number of districts in Tamil Nadu with very promising outcomes, and enlargement to different states is underway.
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Then we moved into extra advanced territory: versatile endoscopy platforms. India presently imports almost all its endoscopy techniques: gastroscopes, bronchoscopes, colonoscopes, ureteroscopes. These are among the many most advanced medical gadgets: optics, electronics, lighting, security, biopsy channels, irrigation channels, every part packed into a versatile tube.
We started this work round 2017-18. It took almost 5 years of improvement, working with a number of firms. At the moment, a completely indigenous endoscopy platform has been created, and a number of merchandise at the moment are rising from it. That is one in all our greatest achievements.
From the incubator aspect, a number of startups have additionally finished very effectively. MediSim VR develops digital actuality platforms for surgical and medical coaching and is already industrial and rising globally.
One other firm, C3 Med-Tech, has centered on ultra-portable eye screening utilizing cellphones with optical attachments. That is utilized in locations the place even moveable medical gadgets are exhausting to deploy attributable to price or logistics.
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Venkatesh Kannaiah: Inform us about your work on the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Mind Centre and its potential affect.
Prof Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: In 2016-17, Kris Gopalakrishnan, an IIT Madras alumnus, started a dialog with us with a easy query: Can we do one thing actually cutting-edge in human mind science?
The thought was to create a brand new science that doesn’t exist at the moment. And when new science is created, new applied sciences inevitably observe, both by instantly advancing that science or by coaching scientific minds to suppose in a different way.
At the moment, a lot of the sector was centered on mouse mind mapping. That’s primarily the baseline of mind science at the moment. The reality is, we nonetheless don’t have an in depth map of the human mind on the mobile stage.
MRI may give photographs on the millimetre or centimetre scale. That’s helpful if you wish to see injury that has already occurred. However if you wish to perceive what is occurring or what’s going to occur, you want perception on the mobile and molecular ranges.
The mind sits contained in the cranium, so we are able to’t instantly see it. For any organ within the physique, detailed visualisation results in higher understanding, higher experimentation, and, finally, higher remedy. With that considering, we requested: what’s lacking in human mind science? Many issues, after all, however one main hole is that we don’t have a whole, high-resolution image of the human mind throughout ages and ailments.
We determined to take this on. After we appeared round, we noticed that researchers had been mapping mouse brains. A mouse mind is about one cubic centimetre. A human mind is over 1,000 cubic centimetres. That’s roughly a thousand occasions extra advanced.
It was clear we would wish completely new expertise. This was an enormous danger. In analysis, growing a brand new expertise and utilizing it to do new science is doubly dangerous, the expertise itself would possibly fail. However we selected to take that danger.
We inaugurated the centre in March 2022. At the moment, it is among the world’s main centres for human mind imaging. That is presently the one method to entry the mind at that stage of element: by imaging the mind in sections beneath the microscope, then digitally reconstructing it. We’re speaking about mapping whole human brains, slicing them, imaging them, and digitally placing them again collectively. A extremely advanced activity as a result of we’re capturing advantageous element (half a micron) at a really massive scale (100 billion cells) and at a quantity of petabytes.
The primary set of human mind maps was launched formally in early 2025. They superior the sector by roughly tenfold in comparison with what existed earlier than. That is the primary such world effort in human mind sciences that India is main, in collaboration with main scientists and researchers from over 10 nations. Our work has obtained important world visibility, together with an editorial within the oldest neuroscience journal on this planet with the title ‘India Will get a Seat on the Desk of Human Mind Cartography’.
This was solely attainable by a deeply interdisciplinary strategy: neuroscience, engineering, expertise, medication, and now large-scale computing.
These maps will probably be highly effective, each as scientific instruments and as expertise platforms for a deeper understanding of the mind, and finally contribute to earlier analysis and higher remedy.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Your ideas on the medtech ecosystem in India. funding, expertise, establishments, analysis, and many others…
Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: In comparison with 15 years in the past, issues are significantly better. No doubt, India now has a number of medtech firms. However their scale of success has been very restricted.
I’m not speaking about unicorn valuations. I imply changing into actually massive firms by way of income and market presence. Only a few have reached that stage. Why hasn’t it scaled? Is it as a result of the market isn’t there? No. The problem is extra structural.
In India, public healthcare or government-funded healthcare accounts for roughly 60-70% of the healthcare quantity. In worth phrases, non-public healthcare could seem bigger, however the authorities absorbs many hidden prices like land and infrastructure.
Startups, by definition, must construct one thing new. That’s how they differentiate. However healthcare techniques, each private and non-private hospitals, are inherently conservative. The affected person normally doesn’t select the medical expertise; hospitals do. Except hospitals start adopting extra homegrown healthcare improvements, startups can’t scale.
In medtech, a lot of the innovation ecosystem of incubators, grants and analysis is already government-funded. However demand creation is the lacking piece. In case you fund innovation however don’t create pathways for adoption, firms stay small.
We frequently say massive firms stifle innovation. However in Indian medtech, the absence of enormous home firms is definitely a part of the issue. We want a number of massive gamers who can mixture merchandise, markets, distribution, and scale.
Usually, in different sectors, massive firms purchase startups and assist them scale. However this has barely occurred in Indian well being tech.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Inform us about a number of Indian-origin world medtech startups which have impressed you.
Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: Twin Well being is an organization that primarily began out in India. One in every of our IIT Madras alumni was a key driver. They’re engaged on reversing diabetes and main metabolic issues utilizing a digital platform, doing in depth measurements and utilizing that information to information and form individuals’s well being behaviour.
That is what scale appears to be like like. As an alternative of constructing one hospital, two hospitals, or 5 hospitals, you construct a digital system that may attain individuals anyplace and constantly form outcomes.
Twin Well being creates a ‘digital twin’ of an individual’s metabolism and makes use of that to personalise interventions. That’s one instance I discover very spectacular.
One other instance is Innovaccer, based by an Indian entrepreneur, and a big a part of its engineering occurs in India. It’s an AI-driven healthcare information firm that works throughout the ecosystem — insurers, hospitals, suppliers, and sufferers. Healthcare is an extended, advanced worth chain with enormous inefficiencies, and corporations like Innovaccer use information and AI to optimise it. Once more, this exhibits the energy of Indian expertise, however these firms are largely US-oriented by way of market and scale.
A 3rd instance I’m notably blissful about is the indigenous MRI effort now underway in India by Voxelgrids. This is among the first severe makes an attempt to construct an MRI system domestically. That is precisely the form of deep-tech, hardware-driven innovation we’d like extra of.
The businesses we mentioned — Twin Well being and Innovaccer — are largely digital, data-centric platforms. However with regards to medical tools, we nonetheless don’t see many globally dominant Indian firms. That’s why I discussed the MRI instance of Voxelgrids. I might additionally say Forus Well being has finished very effectively, however we want it to turn into a worldwide model.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Inform us about one out-of-the-box concept that you’re researching, and which you suppose may have an outsized affect?
Prof Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: The work we’re doing on the mind is maybe essentially the most transformative. We’re presently imaging human brains throughout the lifespan, from fetal levels to 100 years.
When we have now detailed views of the human mind throughout the lifespan, from the second trimester to outdated age, the insights we are able to generate about totally different mind areas and constructions, at mobile and molecular ranges, will probably be extraordinary.
This won’t solely advance neuroscience as a discipline, but additionally assist reply crucial questions on how ailments progress. Degeneration doesn’t occur in a single day. Understanding the gradual adjustments at advantageous decision can have an outsized affect over the approaching a long time.
The affect will unfold in lots of types: new data, new applied sciences, new merchandise, and a greater understanding of how totally different mind areas operate and alter over time. Primarily, we’re constructing what you would name an atlas of the human mind. And from such an atlas, many downstream advances will emerge.
To date, we have now acquired over 350 human brains throughout the lifespan and throughout totally different circumstances, together with each neurotypical brains and people with varied brain-related ailments.
You requested whether or not the affect will probably be seen in years or a long time. The maps and atlases themselves will probably be created over the following few years. However when the worldwide neighborhood begins utilizing these atlases to generate insights, that’s when pharmaceutical firms, gadget makers, and clinicians can construct new approaches. That broader affect will unfold over a long time.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: AI in well being. What do you foresee?
Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: Even if you happen to have a look at healthcare as a complete, it is among the most inefficient sectors. The worth chain is extraordinarily advanced and chaotic. Merely enhancing these processes might create 10-20% effectivity positive aspects, possibly much more.
Some instruments are already rising that are geared toward decreasing administrative burden in healthcare. Administrative work is a large part, simply 10-20% of effort, so decreasing that may have a big effect. Then there are AI brokers supporting workflows, AI-driven diagnostics, and imaging instruments that may now detect abnormalities in scans with accuracy that’s typically extra constant and repeatable than people.
AI can be getting used for drug discovery and predictive analytics. One space that notably impresses me is illness prediction utilizing non-medical measurements.
There was a current research that appeared solely at sleep patterns. Based mostly simply on sleep information, they had been capable of predict dangers for cardiac and different circumstances with surprisingly excessive accuracy. Think about that: utilizing on a regular basis behavioural or physiological indicators, not conventional medical exams, to foretell and forestall illness. That’s very highly effective.
In spite of everything, none of us needs to go to the hospital except we have now to. If well being insights can come from passive, non-clinical information — the way you sleep, the way you stroll, how you progress — that turns into extremely scalable.
In fact, many such approaches are nonetheless on the pilot stage. The exhausting actuality is that healthcare suppliers are essentially conservative. Healthcare techniques are sluggish to vary. It’s additionally a really lengthy and sophisticated worth chain, which slows adoption.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: You appear to be carrying many hats: operating an educational analysis group, massive initiatives, R&D centres, trade collaborations, startup incubation, and many others.
Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam: My mission is to develop impactful healthcare applied sciences out of India which can be of worldwide high quality. The entire actions are related items, directed in direction of it.