A START UP ON PLASMA TREATMENT

Ms. V. Vidhya, Asst Professor, Department of MBA, Sankara College of Science and Commerce

“Necessity is the mother of inventions” the saying is true as far as the current situation is concerned globally. The World is in clutches of COVID 19 and it is really trying to get out of it in hundreds and thousands of means and ways. We may all know that the Biotech companies have introduced vaccine to control the spread of the Covid 19 virus. But usually it takes a year or two to set up the vaccination for the virus after many pre testing and trials. For e.g. Small pox virus, we don’t have it in this current era as we had eradicated it in earlier days with an invention of vaccine by Dr. Edward Jenner.

Similarly Polio virus has also been eradicated from world due to oral Polio vaccine IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine) invented by Dr. Jonas Salk. Likewise inventing vaccines for Covid 19 is not an easy task in this current community spread situation. So, now what is the treatment that can be opt for Covid 19 cases, one way is to go for Siddha, or to Ayurveda or else to Homeopathy which are the traditional ways of treating the cases. Other way the Doctors suggested is Plasma therapy, which has become a good start-up business in today’s world.

Plasma therapy means taking out the Plasma from the completely cured Covid 19 infected persons and injecting into the Covid 19 patients with severe symptoms like ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome). Plasma is the Liquid portion of the blood. The antibodies present in the cured Covid 19 patients are injected into the terminally ill Covid 19 cases so as to boost their immunity to fight the virus in a better way.

This pandemic has potentially led to new cooperative behaviours and creation of new systems, structures and new business models. Two young entrepreneur’s Dr Neil Pinto and Karina Thakrar’s, developed an online platform Pint Networks that aims to connect Plasma donors to the patients affected with Covid 19 cases to facilitate Plasma therapy all over the country. ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) has approved the use of Convalescent Plasma from the cured infected Covid patients to moderately ill or critically ill Covid patients. Initially the response was very good for them and they reach 100+ patients to 60+ donors across major cities in India.

The network Dr Neil Pinto and Karina Thakrar’s consists of two different work streams one for registered donors and other for registered patients. Once the details are verified their network matches the donors to the patients, exchanges their contact details, allows them to connect and go further to donate their plasma.

The hurdle they come across is the acceptance of the donors to donate their plasma for the treatment. Many of them have fear to get into the hospital again for donating their blood. The initiative is good indeed but the quality standards and importantly the data privacy are the issues to be looked into the network. Dr. Neil has said that they have installed the firewall so that data’s will be secured about the donors.

To conclude the current situation is a boon for the rising entrepreneurs to develop many new business models and pick out the opportunities from the crisis.