New Delhi : The world’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) industry is dominated by a handful of global giants. Some of those giants are sharks as well. They are always on the hunt to gobble up smaller manufacturers that bring innovative technologies and retain their dominance. That’s what India’s first MRI maker, the Bengaluru-based Voxelgrids faced.
For decades, countries like the US, Germany, Japan, China, Italy and the Netherlands have built MRI machines that hospitals across the world use, and India is one of their biggest customers. Voxelgrids founder and CEO, Arjun Arunachalam, was running out of money while building one of the world’s most complex medical devices, and competing against corporations worth billions of dollars. So when a multinational giant approached Voxelgrids with an offer during the Covid-19 pandemic, Arunachalam could have taken the easy way out.
The funding allowed the startup to survive long enough to develop what could become India’s first indigenous MRI scanner — a machine that Arunachalam says could eventually reduce the cost of an MRI scan by around 70% and make advanced diagnostics accessible in every corner of the country. “We thought partnering with the company would risk our innovation,” Arunachalam told India Today Digital. What Voxelgrids has manufactured is almost a miracle in the field of medical devices.
MRI machines are among the most expensive and technologically demanding medical devices ever created, requiring years of research, enormous capital and expertise across physics, electronics, software and precision engineering. An electrical engineer specialising in MRI physics, he studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US before spending nearly three years at GE HealthCare’s research centre in America around 2008-09.
After his stint at GE, Arunachalam moved to Singapore, and having briefly taught at IIT Bombay, he realised what was frustrating him. “I wanted to do research on MRIs and build something innovative, but we had to beg to use somebody else’s machine. Companies that built MRIs had no interest in working with Indian institutes because they didn’t consider us a serious country,” Arunachalam told India Today Digital while remembering his days at IIT Bombay as a professor.
“I also wanted to do something meaningful in India and stay here,” Arunachalam said, adding, “My father was an Indian Air Force officer.” For Arunachalam, the problem extends beyond imports. “The harsh truth of us as a country is that we don’t build anything,” he said. India imports every MRI scanner installed in its hospitals. “Last year alone, MRI imports were valued at roughly Rs 3,500 crore,” Arunachalam told India Today Digital.
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