Login With Google
Drones to space Internet, IISc incubates start-ups
Why is it in news?
- Better known for his former role as the programme director and chief designer of India’s indigenous light combat aircraft (LCA), 75-year-old Kota Harinarayana is the founder-chairman of General Aeronautics, an Indian Institute of Science (IISc) incubated start-up.
- The start-up designs and makes unmanned aerial vehicles or drones focused on security and civilian applications.
- One application is to use these drones to transport organs faster than ambulances for organ transplant procedures to save lives.
Start-up stories
- The road transport takes a long time as a result of which quite often when the organ reaches to the recipient, it is in unusable condition.
- Most of the start-ups are based on moonshot ideas.
- These include drones to transport organs, satellites that provide Internet connectivity in rural areas and devices that help doctors to detect and diagnose diseases like cancer.
- The company is also working with IISc to develop ‘Life Box’ a device which can keep the heart harvested from the donor in good condition and increase its preservation time by maintaining various parameters such as temperature.
- The box would be transported to the recipient for transplant using a drone.
- SpaceX challenger- Astrome, a space technology company which could potentially compete globally with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Astrome’s goal too is to solve the problem of connectivity by beaming high bandwidth Internet from space.
- Astrome is developing a technology that it says would cut the cost of Internet access through satellites by 12 times.
- It plans to launch 200 satellites in the next few years to low-earth-orbit to beam reliable Internet to people living in small towns and villages.
- The firm says its Internet would be available in all developing countries and along major sea and air routes.
- Reliable Internet connectivity, says Astrome, has the potential to bridge the rural-urban economic divide and revolutionise healthcare and education.
- Another start-up SIAMAF Healthcare has built a technology for the staging and treatment of breast cancer.
- Its first product is MafPro, an ultrasensitive hand-held magnetic probe which offers “unprecedented quality and value of care benefits” to patients, doctors and hospital administrators, according to the company.
- It can tell how far cancer has spread and that provides enough information to the doctor to make a proper diagnosis.
Challenges
- Most of these ventures have received grants and funds from government-run organisations such as Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) and the State government’s Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology and niche investors.
- However, at a time when e-commerce companies are raising billions of dollars, many of the founders said “scaling up” is a challenge as most of big mainstream venture capital investors shy away from investing in deep science start-ups.
- The mindset of the investors has to change… [and] not only focus on e-commerce but also on intellectual property and technology-led companies
Source
The Hindu