Past, Present, and Future Perspective of Biomedical Innovation in India

Abstract

Innovation to design, develop, and deploy biomedical technologies, for use in health care, has been actively pursued in our country for several decades. Excellent work done by individuals, institutions, and organizations laid the seeds for a biomedical innovation culture in the country. Some of these seeds resulted in revolutionary technologies such as the Jaipur foot, Kalam-Raju coronary stent, Chitra heart valve, and SBMT ventilator. In addition, organized efforts by various governmental agencies and research projects in engineering and medical institutions have given further impetus for innovation to develop biomedical devices. At the same time, these initiatives have taught several hard lessons for current and future innovators. The exigencies created by the COVID-19 pandemic demanded an accelerated pace of innovation to address the urgent needs and uncertainties created by the pandemic. This led to extremely rapid revival, refinement, and recycling of existing technologies. However, most of the so-called COVID-inspired innovations in the country are merely imitations, improvisations, and improvements in existing technologies. Very few can be classified as novel innovations, and almost none are inventions. Failure of these technologies to address the real needs of end-users, limited laboratory testing, absence of clinical validation, and infringement of intellectual property rights makes them unsuitable for use in the healthcare sector. This represents a tremendous wastage of human, material, and financial resources. The way forward is for innovators (and institutions/organizations facilitating innovation) to consider all aspects of the innovation cycle, starting from the generation of ideas to address the real needs of end-users, designing of prototypes, laboratory testing, clinical validation, regulatory approval, commercialization, and post-marketing surveillance. A simplified framework—the KNOW ESSENTIALS algorithm—is presented here, which can help to consolidate the gains of past innovation efforts and encourage genuine innovation in the country.