Bagchis And Parthasarathys Give 425 Crore For Iisc Hosp | Bengaluru News – Times of India

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BENGALURU: Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is setting up the “future of clinical research and innovation” in the form of a not-for-profit 800-bed multispeciality hospital and a medical school on its campus, funded mostly by the single-largest private donation yet of Rs 425 crore from the families of Mindtree co-founders Subroto Bagchi and NS Parthasarathy.
The academic centrepiece of this initiative, IISc said, “will be an integrated dual-degree MD-PhD programme aimed at creating a new breed of physician-scientists, who will pursue careers in clinical research to develop new treatments and healthcare solutions, driven by a bench-to-bedside philosophy.” They will be trained simultaneously in the hospital as well as in the science and engineering laboratories at IISc. Enabling this will be the 800-bed hospital catering to clinical training and research activities of the programme.

Health

To construct the hospital building, designed by Ahmedabad-based architects, IISc on Monday inked a partnership with Susmita and Subroto Bagchi, and Radha and NS Parthasarathy.
The couples will collectively donate Rs 425 crore for the project — the total estimated cost of the hospital and medical school is Rs 900 crore — and the hospital will be named ‘Bagchi-Parthasarathy Hospital’.
Pegging it to be the ‘future of clinical research and innovation’, IISc director Prof Govindan Rangarajan said the institute hopes to produce world-class medical research and at least 50 med-tech startups in the near future.
“We’ve allotted 15 acres on the northern part of the campus for the hospital and medical school. There are 10 more acres earmarked for expansion. We hope to complete the foundational construction by June 2022 and make it fully operational by 2024,” Rangarajan said.

We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with IISc. In a country like ours, medical research and delivery cannot be left to the government or the corporate sector alone. The time has come for more people like us to engage. With IISc, we find shared vision. It is an institution with depth, competence, leadership, and capacity to deliver in scale. We are greatly confident of the lasting, beneficial outcome of our donation.

Susmita Bagchi

Stating that the medical school would only be for PG studies, he said it would be a dual degree, common in Western countries.
“It’ll make possible confluence of basic sciences, engineering, and medical science, strengthening the fields of clinical research and healthcare in India,” he said. The school will also offer an MD-Mtech course which will help medical students learn and improvise with artificial intelligence, data sciences, computer sciences for solving healthcare problems.

IISc’s larger vision to integrate science, engineering, and medicine in one campus is new to India. This is an exciting opportunity to collaborate. IISc’s global reputation and network will attract outstanding talent to create breakthroughs in research and delivery of medicine that must impact the masses. The pandemic we are living through has established the need for urgency in creating universal access and equity in medicine. We’re grateful to be a part of a new journey in the history of India’s most respected research institution.

Radha Parthasarathy

IISc has planned 5.5-year PG courses. In the first six months, students will study biology, nanotechnology and computer science — each for two months, consecutively. “This will help them decide where their interests are and they can spend the next five years studying that subject extensively,” Rangarajan added.
Quoting the examples of multi-disciplinary medical schools in North America, IISc faculty said the school hopes to begin with completing faculty recruitment by 2024 and admitting 70 students in 2025. The fees of this institution are expected to be in line with the fee structure of other government medical institutions.
The plans of the hospital’s services are centred around the patient, as the management along with the star donors of the institution said that they will work to “empower the patient”.
Prof Navakanta Bhat, dean, Interdisciplinary Sciences, IISc, said: “The goal is to treat with empathy, work with digital technology, and impact the health of the next six billion people on the planet because the first billion have enough resources to be taken care of.”
He mentioned that the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated an institution of this magnitude and scale, native to India, “because the ongoing healthcare crisis has taught us that healthcare is the first priority of the 21st century in India is medical advancement and accessibility.”
Talking about how IISc is conceptualising incorporation of augmented reality (AR) for medical research, Prof Usha Vijayraghavan, dean, Biological Sciences, said the hospital and school will have “operation theatres linked with seminar halls where surgeries can be live-streamed for students, tele-medicine for consultations; a bio-repository for retrospective research, and many more such advanced facilities.”

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