The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the gaps in the overall healthcare facilities and demonstrated the overwhelming potential of our population to create a huge vacuum in the supply chain. Therefore, netizens are slowly inching towards wellness platforms, complementary systems of medicine and prophylactic or preventive therapy wherever possible. Based out of Hyderabad, Consytel Life Sciences is an early traction startup in the healthcare space, driven by the aspiration to address therapeutic areas not adequately addressed through modern medicine. The focus of Consytel is to launch innovative formulations based on botanical ingredients that can act as nutraceuticals and prophylactics to retard or slow the progression towards various chronic diseases. Talking about the changing market expectations and consumer shift in the healthcare industry, Dr. Swagatika Satpathy, one of the co-founder says, “Consumer expectations have dramatically swung to wellness and preventive healthcare rather than therapy management.
A broad trend being witnessed is that of nutraceuticals being accepted as a long-term insurance against a plethora of chronic diseases. Of course, preventive therapy can only address a limited spectrum of the healthcare challenges. Fortunately, we at Consytel caught the drift early on and got working on various Phyto-pharmaceuticals addressing the antiviral, cardiovascular, metabolic, pain management and anti-infective segments.”
Consytel has built a portfolio of evidence- backed botanicals to address a wide array of unmet and possibly underserved clinical needs. Their R&D facility at Atal Incubation Centre-CCMB, Hyderabad, is funded by BIRAC, the DBT sponsored marquee funding agency of Govt of India, institutionalized to encourage advanced research having high commercial potential. The Consytel teams’ deep understanding of vector biology and related pharmacology, interestingly, has facilitated an innovative AI/ML driven and IoT enabled peripatetic device which is designed to predict vector borne diseases before they manifest as epidemics.
This is made possible through monitoring of vector densities on a real time basis which is then analysed over large datasets to predict possible sites of emerging epidemics. The data can be utilized by the Municipality enforcement agencies to pre-empt epidemics leading to a high societal impact.
S K Dash, the Managing Director mentions, “Our integrated approach to a stated problem differentiates us from others. Our vision to develop solutions which have the potential for global acceptance has been our driving philosophy. Our emphasis on finding technical solutions through collaborative engagements with reputed Labs such as CCMB( Hyderabad), ILS(Bhubaneswar), IIT Madras and Statens Serum Institut (Copenhagen) have given us a distinctive edge over the competition”.
Road Ahead
Consytel Life Sciences was incorporated in December 2017 with a view to commercialize a novel antimalarial, an outcome of in-house R&D. Their first launch was an antimalarial product under AYUSH regulatory pathway called OPUNIKA® which is targeted to both falciparum and vivax malaria. This was followed by PUNIKAVIR® an antiviral formulation shown to be highly effective against SARS-CoV-2 in the invitro studies conducted at CCMB and ILS.
This was closely followed by a pain-relieving oil packaged as a roll on under the brand name Consytel® oil. The firm launched these brands in the Eastern zone markets of Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha through a co-marketing model. After a successful rollout, Consytel has continuously increased the marketing footprint and clocked a growth of 20% YOY despite the challenges of Covid-19.
Shedding light on future plans, S K Dash concludes, “We at Consytel need to focus on an appropriate sized business opportunity and build a portfolio which would mitigate the business cycle risks. Accordingly, the portfolio should be structured to incorporate a mix of chronic and acute therapies where botanical ingredients have a good scope and are in high acceptance by the Physician fraternity. Moreover, the company has robust plans to enter the biopharmaceuticals segment in the near term. Innovative devices in the healthcare space which have consumer overtones are also being considered for product development. In sum, we aspire to encash on our IP generated assets to build globally accepted brands”.
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