Leveraging AI: staying ahead of the superbugs

About AarogyaAI®

Co-founders, Praapti and Avlokita, were motivated by their life experiences to develop solutions for the mounting challenges of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Growing up in a family of doctors, Praapti was driven to tackle public health issues using her scientific training. Her doctoral research in tuberculosis revealed the complexities of drug resistance as not only a public health crisis but also one with socioeconomic and mental health implications. This learning drove the desire to build a systematic approach towards applying deep tech solutions to solve public health challenges.

Avlokita was inspired by her colleagues' passion for research in infectious diseases. Collaborations with them drove her interest in anti-microbial resistance and real-world solutions rooted in technology.

AMR is a growing public health concern. Microorganisms are changing, rendering them ineffective to traditional antimicrobials and transforming into ‘superbugs’. The focus, therefore, is on solving micro problems in research which do not translate into public application.

AarogyaAI®’s aim is to bridge that gap. Being a young healthtech start-up, AarogyaAI® has leveraged the insights of peers, mentors, and experts to establish a supportive community and navigate the intricacies of entrepreneurship, biotech innovation, and staying up-to-date with scientific trends.

What We Do

AarogyaAI®’s vision is to make precision diagnosis for antimicrobial resistance accessible at the point of care by harnessing the powers of genomics and artificial intelligence. The aim is to reduce the incidence and spread of antimicrobial-resistant infections and stay one step ahead of the bugs! AI helps unearth future drug resistance patterns to preemptively plan actions and combat the next pandemic.

Starting out in 2019, the focus was on effective diagnosis of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (DR-TB). India bears a third of the world’s TB burden, a disease exacerbated by the emergence of drug resistance. Current capital and time-intensive diagnostic infrastructure are unable to address this challenge.

Identifying this need for a more comprehensive and rapid drug susceptibility test (DST), a diagnostic pipeline backed by next-generation sequencing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) was developed.

The pipeline generates a patient-specific drug susceptibility report for all the available anti-TB agents within 24-48 hours. To make a more robust algorithm a comprehensive database of TB samples was built. This in turn enables our AI to track and predict emerging drug resistance.

This multi-dimensional approach is the heart of AarogyaAI®’s work. Without effective tools, for the prevention and treatment of drug-resistant infections, the number of people undergoing failed treatment or dying from infections will only increase.