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Sentinals

Sentinals

The Gates Foundation launched ‘Sentinels Experiment in India’ as an open initiative to support innovation practitioners, new partners, new ideas, and new opportunities that can either solve gaps in existing strategies or create completely new opportunities and pathways to the outcomes sought on the broader global health challenges. This program was specifically designed for supporting early stage and basic research.

The Sentinels initiative intends to source innovation in India, by working with sentinels for excellence and innovation, who can help identify new ideas and scientists in their institutions, networks, and regions. The experiment used special administrative mechanisms to provide awards of INR 50,00,000/- to each innovative project to generate proof-of-concept.
The initiative engaged with seven innovation practitioners for new ideas that are focused on exploring the unique aspect of health issues with special emphasis on innovative, impactful research of new innovations.

Sentinals

The seven supported projects are aiming to solve a wide range of problems are enlisted below: piloting and testing varied concepts:

  • Two projects are exploring the nutrition predictive metrics and nutrient uptake and metabolism coordinates, one, through protein synthesis dynamics in the brain, in rat models at The Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) and the other is studying the Environmental Enteric Dysfunction (EED) in Drosophila Melanogaster (vinegar fly) a low-cost animal model at The University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU) - The Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), Benguluru.
  • The other two projects both at IISc, Bangalore, are studying Mycobacterium tuberculosis, likely to identify the potential ‘anti-latency’ lead molecule(s) and the other is trying develop a novel mycobacterium OMV coated nanoparticle (OMV-particles) for efficient vaccine delivery system.
  • One team at The Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (inStem), Bengaluru, plans to test a technique to establish a gene drive method and engineer into the carrier of Flaviviral infections, Aedes aegypti population without disturbing the ecological niche.
  • A Pune based company, Module Innovations plans to establish proof of concept for a novel system to determine antibiotic resistance profile of 4 major uropathogens against a panel of 8 antibiotics used in current clinical practice, these 4 bacteria include E. coli, Klebsiella, P. aeruginosa and Enterococci spp.
  • Lastly, Sea6 Energy Private Limited, Bangalore aims to improve upon the prototype product by conducting extensive field trials, and developing next-generation products by blending the active ingredients of existing products with the potential active ingredients from other red seaweed species.