1. Please let us know about your journey so far into the healthcare Industry?

Since beginning, I focused my education and professional training on understanding research and corporate finance. As an entrepreneur in the biotechnology industry you need to have a strong understanding of both technology and financials to inspire innovation that caters to population scale disruptions in the healthcare sector.

Since founding Genestore in 2011, our company has been responsible for disrupting the industry, delivering some of the largest population screening programs for genomics based healthcare across the globe. We have screened the genomes of over half a million individuals globally. We have developed a unique expertise in generation of cost-effective/affordable diagnostic testing solutions, and also on the development of smart data driven solutions that enable personalised decision making based on the integration of genetic data.

2. How Covid 19 affected the healthcare Industry ? Do you see any momentum?

In my opinion, the COVID 19 pandemic will have a positive impact on the Indian healthcare ecosystem. The pandemic has forced an exponential rise in the clinical testing infrastructure in our country. Additionally, our national manufacturing base for diagnostic testing kits has also rapidly grown.

Post Covid 19, the clinical testing laboratories will be forced to explore aggressive clinical testing programs across the many other infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis C that impact the population of our country. In addition to the availability of affordable locally manufactured tests, the country is certainly going to benefit from the point of better population control of infectious diseases, and many other conditions that rely on the availability of molecular diagnostic testing for disease management.

3. How are you seeing this pandemic and your company’s contribution in this Direction?

The pandemic has a global footprint. GeneStore has leveraged its global network of manufacturing facilities to make available highly affordable diagnostic test kits for the detection of COVID 19. Genestore is playing an active role in supporting developed and developing economies/governments to lower the cost of clinical testing for COVID 19. This can be best highlighted in India, where our company launched a Made-in-India version of the RT PCR test kit for a price of under 3 US dollars, given the government price caps on clinical testing in some states being as low as INR 1200, large private laboratories can still stay commercially viable without compromising on quality.

4. Testing and Vaccines are 2 major things to overcome this battle, What is your perspective in this?

One of the major reasons for the outbreak of COVID 19 is the high rate of infectivity in asymptomatic individuals. There certainly is a requirement for more stringent tracking of positive cases so that medium to high risk asymptomatic cases can be traced and subjected to precision testing.

Vaccine development is proceeding at a fast pace, with many vaccine candidates being in late stage clinical testing. The challenges faced on the launch of a vaccine are multifold involving not only clinical efficacy but also safety, and consumer confidence.

5. Please let us know our readers, especially doctors and healthcare professionals, how these test kits work?

Real Time PCR test kits are considered the gold standard in the detection of COVID 19. RT PCR tests are capable of detecting viral concentrations as low as 1 to 5 copies of the virus. So, the sensitivity and specificity of this category of testing is extremely high.

The test is based on the purification of the RNA (genetic code) of the virus and detecting regions of the viral genetic code using probes that are specific only to that particular type of virus. The detection of the probes and the virus genetic sequence is made possible by the fluorescence and lasers that are packaged together in machines called RT PCR. PCR uses enzymes that have the power to detect and amplify the slightest quantities of the Viral RNA sequences.