Two drugs to treat Covid get regulator’s nod
Two vital drugs to treat Covid-19 got the drug regulator’s nod on Friday. While Glenmark Pharma got the approval to launch oral antiviral favipiravir, Cipla and Hetero got the nod for Gilead’s repurposed drug remdesivir.
Techeagle Innovations, the drone manufacturer start-up Zomato acquired in December 2018, has decided to part ways with the food delivery firm. The start-up will now venture into the health care sector.
“A mutual decision to part ways with Zomato was in discussion since December 2019. However, the Covid-19 crisis accelerated growth of the health care sector and no other time could have been better for Techeagle to venture into contactless medical and essentials delivery segment via drones. This will see hockey stick growth in the near future,” said Vikram Singh Meena, founder and chief executive officer of Techeagle.
Techeagle was founded in 2015 by Meena when he was a student at Iit-kanpur. Since then, his young venture had been actively involved in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), with prime focus on custom-made drones.
Techeagle now aims to create an on-demand drone delivery network in India for package delivery, starting with health care and essentials. For this, it is already working on projects like ‘Medicine from The Sky Project’ with the Telangana government and World Economic Forum.
“Techeagle is in talks with various health care providers and logistic companies to help them build a network of ‘package delivery drones’ to make the supply chain and last-mile delivery efficient and seamless,” said Meena.
Anshu Abhishek, co-founder and chief executive officer (COO) of Techeagle said in the next 1218 months, when vaccines and treatment become available for
Covid-19, there would be a scarcity of supply amid growing global demand. “Contactless drone delivery would complement the common mode of delivery for vaccines, medicines, and supplies. This would help keep people at home and manage scarce supplies for health workers,” said Abhishek.
Techeagle was part of Zomato’s plan towards dronebased food delivery in India, creating a hub-to-hub delivery network powered by hybrid multi-rotor drones. Zomato carried out a test delivery last June at one of the remote sites approved by aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil
Aviation (DGCA). The ‘payload’ carried by the drone during the test was a food item.
The unmanned aircraft system (UAS) market in India is projected to touch $886 million by 2021, while the global market is likely to be $ 21.47 billion, according to a ministry of civil aviation report last year.
Media reports on Friday reported that Meena had parted ways with Zomato, but the Gurugram-based food delivery firm will continue with its drone delivery plans.
The DGCA, last month, gave permission to 13 Indian drone consortia to conduct experimental below visual line of sight operations in order to submit log reports to the aviation regulator by September-end. “DGCA’S recent permissions to begin testing drone delivery is great – we are going to move forward with our testing as soon as it is safe for our team to travel to the designated testing locations,” said a Zomato spokesperson.
Zomato doesn’t own any equity in Techeagle and the firm decided to separate from Zomato because of vision misalignment, according to sources.