Alleviating complications associated with diabetes through early detection

According to the WHO, 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, and this has been steadily rising each year. Diabetes is a chronic, metabolic disease characterised by high blood sugar levels. If left unchecked, the disease can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes, lower limb amputation, and death.

Almost one in five people with diabetes will need treatment for diabetic nephropathy – the name given to kidney damage caused by diabetes. If spotted early, diabetic nephropathy can be slowed down with treatment, but more accurate and reliable tests are needed.

Supported under the Newton-Bhabha partnership, Dr Pankaj Parashar, a recipient of the Royal Academy of Engineering Leaders in Innovation Fellowship programme, has developed a point-of-care diagnostic device to tackle this problem. His device, ‘Scintiglo’, offers an accurate and reliable doorstep diagnostic and monitoring service for individuals who do not have easy access to healthcare services – working to detect early signs of kidney disease.

Dr Parashar’s innovation is also helping to detect high-risk pregnancies. Pregnant women with diabetes are more at risk of serious health complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Every year millions of women across the world rely on multiple urine tests to confirms signs of a high-risk pregnancy. Scintiglo offers a cheap, quick and reliable way of detecting high-risk pregnancies, allowing complications to be detected early on and planned prevention strategies to be implemented.

Dr Parashar has achieved some notable successes since developing Scintiglo. Most recently, he received a certification of recognition in the Market Disruptor Tech Innovation category at the DST-FICCI Global R&D Summit 2020. He was also a winner at ‘Pulse the Venture’ by CNN-New18 and achieved second place at the National Start Up Summit 2017, delivered by the Department of Science and Technology - Government of India. Now there is hope that Dr Parashar will build on these successes and his work will be scaled up to support developing countries tackling the global issue of diabetes – therefore contributing to SDG 3 which promotes Good Health and Wellbeing.

We have developed a device and are working hard to make it even better, so that patients can live healthier and longer lives.

Dr Pankaj Parashar