Game-changing moves

Founders: Deepak Nair, Jojo Jacob and Anish Mathew
Year: 2025
Big idea: Developing diagnostic tools for neurodegenerative diseases

At a get-together with two schoolmates, Deepak Nair, Professor at the Centre for Neuroscience at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, mentioned the research he was conducting in his laboratory. He asked if the work could be turned into a commercial enterprise — and the other two jumped at the idea. So, with Jojo Jacob, an Indian Army veteran, and Anish Mathew, who had an engineering and finance background, Nair set up eNLife Research to develop diagnostic tools for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD).

"At the laboratory, I was trying to understand how the brain's synapse (the smallest functional connectivity in the organ) works, and what is the basis for the failure in synaptic communication," says Nair, who completed his Master's in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and PhD from the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Germany. The research identified smaller units that functioned as nanomachines within a single synapse.

Nair says the nanomachines precede the onset of AD, and their regulation will be vital for early detection and treatment. One of the big gaps with AD is in therapeutics, he adds. Drugs are mostly administered after a patient is diagnosed with AD. "It would help if it were possible to understand who was likely to get the disease," Nair says. Research in his lab had shown that many steps led to AD. Nair looked at the tests that were available and found there were only a few that could predict the onset of Alzheimer's.

He says their start-up seeks to determine whether the markers available in blood samples can predict the onset of AD. Similar attempts had been made elsewhere, but, he says, most of them relied on research-grade equipment. "Our idea was to get a highly sensitive test, one that could be used in every blood testing centre in the country. For that, we need a binder, an electronic read-out platform and an analytics platform," Nair says.

Incubated at the IISc's Foundation for Science Innovation and Development, eNLife Research is working to develop a table-top device that can be used for testing blood samples for AD and other neurodegenerative diseases. It will look at markers that are specific to Indian conditions, apart from those that are currently available. The company is at Technology Readiness Level 4, and the prototype is getting ready, he adds. The system will be scalable, enabling it to be used with a host of markers to diagnose brain-related disorders, he adds.

Founders: Subhadeep Banerjee and Nivedita Sarkar
Year: 2022
Big idea: To develop photostable fluorescent dyes for high-res imaging

The husband-wife duo of Subhadeep Banerjee and Nivedita Sarkar carry complementary skills to their start-up, Fluoresight Bioprobes. Banerjee, who graduated in chemistry from Calcutta University and went to the U.S. for his Master's and PhD in Organic Chemistry, is a Professor at the BITS Pilani Goa campus. Sarkar's PhD in Life Sciences from the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute in Kolkata was in toxicology and cancer.

Sarkar used fluorescent dyes during her PhD and found that some were more photostable and brighter than others. Banerjee, who had trained in the chemistry of fluorescent dyes, realised the photostable dyes could be used for fluorescence microscopy. "That is how we started talking about how we could take this forward," Banerjee says. Their company was incubated at the Goa campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani.

Banerjee explains that fluorescent dyes, or fluorophores, are critical to fluorescence microscopy, which is used to tag specific cellular components for high-resolution bioimaging. Fluorescent dyes, Banerjee adds, exhibit a property called the Stokes shift, in which the energy of fluorescence emission is lower than that of absorption, resulting in emission at longer wavelengths. In many available dyes, the separation between the absorption and the emission is small, he says. This results in a lack of clarity and lower-quality images, because a certain fraction of the emission is reabsorbed. "I saw that if the commercial dyes had a Stokes shift of 10-25 nanometres, my dyes had a Stokes shift of 100-150 nanometres, with clear separation between the two spectra: the absorption spectra and the emission spectra," he says. Banerjee adds that they realised this would be a game-changer for high-resolution imaging.

The duo determined which structural types would be good for imaging in light cells, for painting the entire cell, and then for localising the fluorescent dye inside the cells. "We found the chemistry to be reliable, and that we could make decent quantities of the dye. Based on these facts, we understood that here was a platform that could be scaled up in terms of wide-ranging business applications," Banerjee says.

The next step for them, he says, was to understand the challenges. Some of the important issues were the global supply chain, the cost and the time it took for the probes to be delivered. Banerjee says their start-up's dyes are target-specific for each subcellular component, based on their physicochemical properties. They launched their dyes in 2024, targeting scientists and researchers as customers. "It is a niche product," he says, for it doesn't have large-scale commercial application at present.