Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Dec 22, 2005
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Dec 22, 2005 |
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Marketing
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New Products & Services Industry & Economy - Health Home-made reagent to spur low-cost HIV tests Madhumathi D.S.
Bangalore , Dec. 21 A CRUDE comparison for a critical diagnostic development, but it is perhaps like making your own bread when you cannot afford a loaf. The `win-win-win' product in question is a reagent kit used in HIV monitoring tests; and the developer, Silicon Valley's celebrated `serial entrepreneur' (whose half a dozen medical technology enterprises have been acquired or prospered). Dr Bala S. Manian's Bangalore-based medical technology company ReaMetrix has launched its locally developed reagent, the first such in the HIV testing line. According to Dr Manian, ReaMetrix's founder-Director, it is the imported reagent that often pushes the bill for the tests at your pathology lab. ReaMetrix imported the antibody, the key ingredient, and is offering the reagent to labs at Rs 150, or a fourth of the imported unit cost for 50 tests. And the patient also wins to the same extent: each test could now come down from Rs 2,000 to Rs 500. His Tri-T Stat reagent is the first in the series of Accuford (accurate + affordable) brands that are in the offing. By bringing down HIV monitoring cost, Tri-T Stat (that will tell the status of the T-cells of the patient) will tell HIV-positive patients when to go slow on medication, and thereby save the cost of the drug and its side-effects. "More than the economics of it, it is about the quality of life of an AIDS patient; so that he may die with AIDS rather than of it," Dr Manian, who founded ReaMetrix in May 2003, told Business Line. Tri-T State is the first of at least 50 other high-impact tests that are in the pipeline over the next 18 months. One of them is a revolutionary `multiplex' test that would rule out about five infections at one go and speed up treatment. ReaMetrix has tied up with Bangalore-based Millipore India, a key service and product supplier to pharmaceutical companies, to market the HIV test reagent and the pipeline range. For Millipore too, the HIV reagent would be the first foray into marketing diagnostic chemicals and it has set up a 10-member dedicated and trained team to market it to path labs in the metros and big cities.
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