Module Innovations wins Discovery Award seed funding grant

Pune: The Module Innovations, a startup based in Pune, has won a Discovery Award seed-funding grant that will help them develop their ideas further for the very prestigious £10 million Longitude Prize. Run by innovation foundation, Nesta and supported by Innovate UK as funding partner, the Longitude Prize was set up to encourage companies and teams help tackle the very topical issue of antibiotic resistance.

Module Innovations is one of 13 teams globally to have been awarded this grant, and is one of two teams from India. As a part of this award, they will receive seed grants of upto £25,000. They have also made it to the top 10 winners in the India Innovation Growth Program (IIGP 2.0) 2017, a public-private partnership between the Department of Science and Technology, Lockheed Martin Corporation and Tata Trusts for promoting innovations.

Module team was selected among 1300 candidates to receive a cash prize of Rs 25 lakhs from Mr YS Chowdhary, Minister of State for Science and Technology & Earth Sciences. As a part of the program, Module will be visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, for further connects and funding opportunities.

Globally, there are 150 million reported cases of urinary tract infections (UTI) every year, and it is believed that half of all women will contract UTI once in their lifetime. If left untreated, UTI can trigger kidney damage and sepsis, leading to death. Therefore, timely detection and correct antibiotics is the need of the hour. Module Innovations, incubated at Venture Center, is developing an affordable and innovative diagnostic platform –USense – for rapid microbial detection. Usman, the COO, states that the small credit card sized strip will allow for visual detection of the presence of four specific UTI-causing bacteria in less than an hour, a significant reduction from the time required for standard culture testing (2-3 days).

Maya, a research scientist at Module, is excited about the impact USense will have on the lives of people and especially females, who are at a greater risk of UTI. The results are easy to interpret, and the device can be used in the convenience of your home and runs without electricity, she said.

“It is truly an honor to receive the Longitude Prize Discovery Award. We feel excited to be able to solve one of the biggest challenges currently, – antimicrobial resistance. Moreover, our team is ecstatic to have received the IIGP 2.0 award for being the top 5 social impact startups in India,” commented Mr Sachin Dubey, Co-Founder and CEO of Module Innovations, signs off on a positive note.