Friday, March 17, 2017

15-yr-old invents device to detect silent heart attacks

It is not every day that a 15-year-old gets invited to be a guest for two weeks at the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, and spend time with the President of India. Akash Manoj was that teenager. Passionate about science and aeronautics as a kid, he participated in a number of science workshops, symposiums, aviation workshops representing his school The Ashok Leyland School in Hosur, Tamil Nadu. Having entered a NASA space settlements contest, Manoj wrote a project and made it to a two-week programme at NASA in the US, in 2013. His scientific bent of mind was “triggered” right there, while looking up in awe at a massive rocket launcher. Teenagers were lapping up Harry Potter and fantasy fiction but Manoj devoured online medical literature. The abrupt death of his grandfather after a silent heart attack provoked the young geek to read up all he could on cardiovascular science. It really helped as his parents were “atypical”.
The son of a businessman and a homemaker mother, Manoj reveals: “My parents, are not concerned about marks, they never ask me my test scores. They strongly believe that practical knowledge is better than focusing on marks. This attitude helped me or else I would be fretting about my exams right now.” It is this atmosphere at home, which allowed his “inquisitive” questioning mind to invent a heart device. Manoj wakes up every day at 4 am to tackle his school work and devotes his evenings to his passion: medical research.
Manoj's path-breaking heart device, to put it succinctly, is a patch, which will help detect a heart attack six hours before it happens. It took him two years to develop this novel device for at-risk patients like diabetics, patients with abnormal cholesterol levels and other heart-related diseases.
Silent heart attacks, which appear asymptomatic, are alarmingly common and extremely deadly. In these cases, doctors are unlikely to administer a crucial FABP3 (a biomarker of heart attacks linked to cardiac ischemia) blood test because of the lack of visible symptoms to warrant a diagnostic test.
Manoj's project investigated a technique that can potentially be coupled with trans-cutaneous UV-protein quantification to non-invasively measure the amount of FABP3 in a patient's blood and alert him or her of a silent heart attack.
Naturally, accessing research lab facilities and resources were a challenge, he admits. After he was chosen for the President's Innovation Scholars In-Residence programme at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Manoj also got access to the country's Department of Biotechnology's BIRAC, which granted him Rs 1 lakh to develop his project further. Also, with the President's intervention, AIIMS Delhi also mentored Manoj on modifying his invention to make it better. “It will take one and half years to complete work on this invention. It is a huge process, and I will have access to the research labs at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru too,” says Manoj, in the process of patenting his invention. The medical product is likely to surface in 2018 at a cost of Rs 900. Manoj wants the government to promote his invention and not the private industry, who he feels will kill it since it is cost-effective.


Source: DNA,16th March,2017