Molbio’s Dr Chandrasekhar Nair bags Infosys Prize 2021
Dr Chandrasekhar Nair, Director and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Goa-based Molbio Diagnostics, has been awarded ‘The Infosys Prize 2021’ in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in recognition of the development and large-scale commercialisation of Truenat. The point-of-care testing platform for PCR-based medical diagnostics has been hailed internationally as a breakthrough platform that is a cost-effective, impactful solution in healthcare. Truenat has enabled testing for millions of COVID-19 cases across resourcelimited settings in India and diagnosing multiple infectious diseases like tuberculosis, dengue, malaria and more globally. The pointof-care platform is endorsed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for tuberculosis detection globally. Dr Nair has worked with India’s nascent medical device manufacturing ecosystem to eventually set up state-of-the-art facilities to manufacture high-precision plastic test consumables. He spent over a decade primarily translating laboratory technology to scale in fermentation, downstream processing, and natural product chemistry. His interest eventually shifted to in-vitro diagnostics and point-of-care systems.