Setting up an effective public health system to prevent, detect, and respond to adverse health events requires good surveillance in conjunction with sensitive, economical, and readily available diagnostic options. The availability (or lack thereof) of diagnostic healthcare in rural India is a pressing issue. There is also a dearth of good, well-functioning licensed laboratory services for point-of -care diagnostics. Diagnostics remain a challenge in our country of 1.3 billion people. Major hurdles in this area include high-cost and need for skilled and trained personnel. Therapeutic platforms can facilitate proof-of-concept studies for the development of innovative treatment strategies. The specificity of biotherapeutic platforms makes them popular for the treatment of some diseases refractory to small molecule therapy. Translational research towards the development of new and improved diagnostics and therapeutics is therefore the need of the hour.
Finally, since most of these technologies were created in the west, the cost of reagents and equipment is considerable. Another of our focus areas, therefore, is the indigenization of technologies used in nucleic based diagnostics development.
TIGS is working to develop multiple platforms, that include instrumentation and knowledge expertise, in order to accelerate early research for quick transition to the development of a treatment modality. Once developed, these platforms will be open and available as a shared resource for multiple stakeholders to work in a disease-agnostic manner.