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Raghu Rajagopal, 44, is a serial entrepreneur. He has been involved with a few ventures in the US and in India and is now co-founder of a social enterprise that he believes will make a world of difference for patients with life-threatening diseases such as leukaemia.
An alumnus of BITS-Pilani, in Engineering Technology, Raghu was into software development and software consulting, in the US. He was involved in three entrepreneurial ventures – an e-business services company, a product company and a BPO.
Early ventures
On his return to India, Raghu started Energeate, which provides consultancy to cross-border and early-stage companies. He is also active with ventures like Green Peppers, which is into corporate catering; Yelelo, a service provider for NRIs; and Envision Mobility, a mobility solutions provider.
But, what is keeping Raghu busy nowadays is Datri Blood Stem Cell Donors Registry, which he has started along with two others to create a list of donors from whom peripheral blood stem cells can be collected and transplanted into leukaemia patients to cure them.
A charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a network of entrepreneurs, Raghu became aware of the potential of peripheral blood stem cell transplant to treat patients with leukaemia while he was in the US. He had participated in donor drives to create awareness about donating stem cell. There is only a 25 per cent probability of finding a genetic match for the stem cell from within the family, in the case of persons requiring a transplant. The others have to go outside the family and look for a genetic match and then a transplant. The US, says Raghu, has a registry called the National Marrow Donor Programme.
Raghu, who returned to India in 2005, realised that for such a large country there was no functional registry. It took a while for the idea of forming a registry in India to crystallise, mainly because of the costs involved in doing Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) typing. He tied up with Nezih Cereb and Soo Young Yang, founders of Histogenetics, a laboratory that specialised in HLA typing, for starting a blood stem cell registry. Thus was born Datri, a Sanskrit word that means donor.
According to Raghu, Datri organises donor drives in various places and has signed up 33,000 donors across the country since 2010. It has also facilitated 25 donations so far, including one for a patient in London.
How it works
It works like this: the donor’s blood sample is sent to the lab for analysis. For a patient to go through a transplant, there has to be a match of nearly 10 parameters. Once the matching is done, the peripheral blood stem cells are harvested from the donor, stored and transported in temperature-controlled containers and sent to the hospital where the recipient is, within 48 hours. Importantly, the container has to be taken through the airport without it being subject to x-ray examination. This requires special permission from the authorities. “I have been a courier for most of the patients,” says Raghu.
It costs about Rs 5-7.5 lakh per stem cell transplant, entirely borne by the patient.
Raghu says for scaling up operations Datri will need funding. But, he is not looking at anything immediately. “Right now, we are all right, because we have facilitated 25 transplants. Histogenetics is supporting us in terms of helping us build the software, putting in the initial money,” he says.
Datri, which is part of the World Marrow Donors Association, is looking to cross the milestone of having one lakh donors.
“What is amazing is with 33,000 donors, we are able to get search requests every week from at least 20 patients from across the world. We are able to find matches for at least three or four of them, and what gets converted into donation is a much smaller number,” he says.
However, the biggest challenge, admits Raghu, is creating awareness about donating peripheral blood stem cells. This is where he believes that large companies can chip in and organise donor drives.
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