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
