MOLBIO DIAGNOSTICS: Journey of Molbio Diagnostics to a Unicorn: An insight

The E-Cell of Padre Conceicao College of Engineering invited the Director of Molbio Diagnostics, Sriram Natarajan, to share his experiences regarding the journey of Molbio Diagnostics from a startup to a Unicorn on 26^th November 2021 at 3 pm. Sriram Natarajan has 34 years of experience in developing, manufacturing, and marketing diagnostic kits catering to the national and international markets. Sriram founded the Tulip group in 1989. Molbio Diagnostics was founded as a startup in 2014. It was Goa’s first startup to cross the one billion turnovers obtaining the unique status of Unicorn. Sriram provided an overview of the products manufactured by the company. He detailed the strategies that helped power Molbio to a billion-dollar unicorn. Elaborating on the technical aspects, Molecular Diagnostics tests have high precision, high specificity and sensitivity. The Real-Time PCR is regarded as Gold standard technology. However, this has still not become a routine test in clinical practice due to the challenges. Truenat® from Molbio is the world’s first Point of Care (PoC) molecular diagnostics platform, using PCR technology that can diagnose 25 diseases currently (with additional 40+ diseases in the pipeline). Two decades of R&D, working with healthcare institutions globally e.g., CSIR, ICMR, BIRAC, Grand Challenges Canada, BMGF, FIND to miniaturize the PCR technology, with patents approved/applied in 100+ countries. Molbio has supplied over 8.2 million kits for COVID testing and installed over 4000 machines over the last year.

Sriram interacted with the students and answered several questions ranging from technology, funding, entrepreneurship spirit, how to handle failure, to name a few. Fifty students from PCCE attended the session. Vishrut Mangoli coordinated it, President of E-Cell, Shailesh Khanolkar, Chairman , E-Cell, and Alzira Xavier, Vice-chairman, E-Cell. The E-Cell of PCCE conducted the event.