University with Potential for Excellence in Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation has been awarded by UGC based on the strength of the Anna University to form multidisciplinary teams across diverse departments and expertise to design, develop and commercialize products, especially devices, and establish national facilities like National Hub for Healthcare Instrumentation Development by bringing together scientists, engineers, clinicians and industrialists. Since the University had already developed indigenously a clinically validated manual device capable of determining the antibiotic susceptibility within 6-8 h using a patented method for tackling the current menace of multi drug resistance among disease-causing bacteria, UGC wanted the technical university to concentrate only on the Focus Area of developing an automated version of the same with the capability of identifying the bacterial pathogen and make it available to the market at the most affordable price through establishing the prototyping and limited manufacturing within the campus.

The objectives for the five years from the sanctioning of the product are to develop various intermediary commercial versions and make them ready for marketing in a business model the University has to innovate. The following part describes the first milestone of a commercial semi-automated imager that is being validated by a NABL-accredited Microbiological Lab in Coimbatore with a laboratory prototype of a semi-automated machine for sample preparation. As these two are commercialized as Mark-1 products, automated high-throughput imager and automated sample preparation units will be developed in the next year. Their integration will form the commercial prototype for Mark -2 product. Pathogen detection methods will be developed and integrated subsequently to make Mark-3 and Mark-4 products (high-throughput).

Apart from the prototype development, UGC’s grant provides for building the infrastructure required to develop a variety of biomedical devices and commercialize them after prototyping, limited manufacturing and clinical validation. Appropriate platforms are being created with state-of-the-art equipment and infrastructure.