Each year, around 1.7 million people die from tuberculosis, and one-third of these deaths occur in India. One of the prime reasons for increasing death rates is TB isn’t diagnosed easily and takes at least four weeks to detect, making timely treatment challenging. To make this worse, sometimes specific drugs end up being ineffective in treating the individual patient. Around 29% of deaths caused by antimicrobial infections are due to drug-resistant TB.
However, there are individuals like Praapti Jayaswal who are actively addressing this critical issue. As the founder of “AarogyaAI,” Jayaswal employs genomics and Artificial Intelligence to provide timely, cost-effective diagnoses and effective medication combating antimicrobial resistance.
The Journey Of Praapti Jayaswal: A Visionary In Healthcare Innovation
Praapti Jayaswal comes from a medical background. Her father is a spine surgeon, and her grandfather was a TB physician. Witnessing their work, she developed a strong inclination towards science and related studies.
In 2009, Praapti completed her Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology from Mount Carmel College in Bengaluru. She continued her education at the University of Madras, earning a Master of Science (MS) in Biotechnology in 2011. In between, she also did multiple trainings at AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi), visited many labs and did Internships.
Later, inspired by her grandfather, she chose to do her Ph.D. in tuberculosis research at the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Delhi. While researching tuberculosis, she found Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) becoming one of the most formidable health challenges. She discovered that drug resistance wasn’t just a physical problem but a mental problem, too. This realization implanted an idea to address the effective diagnosis of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (DR-TB).
AarogyaAI’s Inception: Innovating TB Diagnostics
While she was doing her Ph.D., she got an unexpected offer from the UK-based startup, “Entrepreneur First,” a platform encouraging individuals to build startups from scratch. She already had a plan to establish something on her own, so she joined.
There, she met with a vibrant group of aspiring entrepreneurs, including one of her old acquaintances, Avlokita Tiwari, whom she had known since 2012. Avlokita had recently completed her MS in Bioinformatics from the University Of Turku, Finland, and was on the lookout for job prospects.
Knowing this, Praapti approached her, proposing the idea of establishing a company together to address the impacts of drug resistance in tuberculosis that she had discovered during her research. Seeing her passion and determination, Avolikta collaborated with her.
In 2019, they co-founded health tech startup “AarogyaAI” with the aim of combating Antimicrobial Resistance and proactively staying ahead of bugs. The Bengaluru-based company AarogyaAI functions as a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. It has developed a quick and budget-friendly test using artificial intelligence and machine learning that rapidly identifies drug resistance in tuberculosis patients, aiding in better treatment. This test provides results within hours, avoiding trial and error.
Utilizing AWS-managed services such as Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon RDS and Elastic Load Balancing, AarogyaAI streamlines tasks that would typically require significant engineering setup and management efforts. Employing a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model, the platform caters to diagnostic labs and hospitals as its primary customers, with plans to engage pharmaceutical companies in the future. Also, while similar tests in the market cost about 20,000, AarogyaAI’s test is priced lower, ranging from 9,000 to 12,000.
Breakthroughs And Expansion
In January 2022, the company raised USD 700k in a seed funding round, with contributions from Info Edge, Avaana Capital, and Redstart Labs, as well as participation from existing investors Entrepreneur First and First In Ventures. The company has also secured investment from “Illumina Inc.,” the world’s largest genomics company, through the Illumina Accelerator Program based in San Francisco, USA.
“AarogyaAI” has gained multiple recognitions and awards from various entities within the Indian ecosystem, including the Minister of Health, the Government of India, Startup India, and BIRAC.
Praapti Jayaswal’s journey epitomizes a steadfast dedication to revolutionizing the medical sphere, particularly in transforming tuberculosis (TB) diagnostics and treatment through cutting-edge technology and pioneering approaches.
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