The patient is a rectangular tabletop kept at about four feet high. The trainee doctor pushes a tube through a hole on its side, acting as a purported mouth of the patient. As the tube goes it through the gut, a screen lights up with realistic simulations of the mouth, through and the rest of the esophagus as the tubes moves into the stomach. The doctors feel resistance in their hands as they push the tube, just as in a real endoscopy procedure.The feeling of resistance is unique to this device, called EndoMymik, developed by the startup Mimyk from the Indian Institute of Science. Simulations like these are increasingly important for surgeons and interventional physicians around the world. Endoscopy training devices are made by other companies around the world, but Mimyk’s device is low cost and has the advantage of touch. It developed out of a PhD project of Shantanu Chakravarthy at the mechanical engineering department of IISc.Over the last five years, India’s science and technology institutions have become fertile grounds for generating startups. Almost always, these startups have formed with a business idea in mind, with the founders working backwards from the idea to develop the technology. Student startups were largely from undergraduate students, with the business idea often unrelated to the field of study of the students. It was rare for PhD students to set up companies, and even rarer for them to convert their research projects into companies. Now some students in top research institutions are doing exactly that.Two startups in IIT Madras have grown out of PhD projects, both biotechnology companies: Fibsol makes biofertilisers, and Yaathum Biotech develops rapid diagnostic kits. Parul Ganju continued her PhD work at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) by setting up Ahammune Biosciences, now incubated in Pune. At IIT Delhi, research during PhD has resulted in two healthcare companies: Valetude Health Premus and Cutting Edge Medical Devices. All of these have been set up in the last two years.Chakravarty had come to his PhD programme with clear intentions of working on haptics, or the science of touch. At the same time, GK Ananthasuresh, professor at the mechanical engineering department, had requests from the Asian Institute of Gastroenterology in Hyderabad to develop a simulation platform for endoscopy and other medical procedures. The two objectives met and Chakravarty started work under Ananthasuresh. “I spent my PhD years understanding how doctors perceive the sense of touch,” says Chakravarty.Once he understood that, developing a simulation device became a possibility. Simulating medical procedures realistically was a hard problem to solve, but Chakravarty had help from many quarters. A simulation device needed high quality graphics, and Chakravarty had help from Vijay Natarajan, professor at the Computer Science and Automation department in IISc.Computing tissue deformation in real time – for visual rendering – was not straightforward. Two companies provided simulation systems for doctors: CAE healthcare based in Montreal, Canada, and 3D systems based in South Carolina in the US. Chakarvarty had realized that the haptics and simulation provided by both companies were not good enough. In the training device Mimyk has built, doctors have auditory, tactile and visual inputs during a procedure simulation.Mimyk is expecting to enter a rapidlygrowing market later this year. The market research firm Markets and Markets estimates that global medical simulation market will increase to $2.57 billion by 2022, from $1.28 billion in 2017. Onefourth of doctors trained every year in the world is in India.Mimyk is the third company in IISc to have grown out of a PhD project in the last two years. The first one was PathShodh, which makes a hand-held clinical testing device. The second was BendFlex, a company that designs devices using novel and proprietary methods. BendFlex grew out of Ananthasuresh’s research group. PathShodh was from the nanoscience department. IISc expects more companies to develop out of its research. “Many of us here in IISc are keen on doing projects that have commercial or social value,” says Ananthasuresh.IISc has now built an ecosystem that will help to convert research projects quickly into commercial ventures. Space is available in the campus of its commercial arm, the Society for Innovation and Development (SID), across the road from the main campus. SID provides space, money and mentorship.The large infrastructure and varied expertise of IISc is useful for product development, as Mimyk found out. Nitin Shivshankar, PhD student from the computer science department, developed the graphics. Raghu Menon from the Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing helped with the product design.Funding is also available widely for early stages of startups. Mimyk got funding from the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyberphysical Systems at SID. The funding from Bosch was used to hire two PhD students, one of whom was Nitin Shivshankar, who joined the company when it was set up. After the company was set up, the Department of Biotechnology gave a grant of Rs 50 lakh. The government of Karnataka also gave Rs 50 lakh. Mimyk is on the verge of raising more money.It is the presence of this ecosystem – expertise, money, office space, mentorship – that is prompting faculty and students to select commercially-viable projects for research. If a research problem with commercial potential is solved, it is now easier than ever to convert it into a startup. With so many students and faculty now interested in entrepreneurship, it is possible for many complementary ideas being developed in the same lab. This is what happened at IIT Madras.Anant Raheja has joined IIT Madras as a PhD student in 2009. His research, to develop electrospinning nanofibers, was done under the supervision of two professors: TS Natarajan of the physics department and TS Chandra of biotechnology department. Electrospinning is a developing technique that uses electric charge to draw polymer fibres of extremely small diameter. It is a platform technology that has wide applications in many industries.During his PhD, he also worked on a project sponsored by the central government’s department of biotechnology. During this project, he hit on a method to embed microbes into the fibres. This was not immediately useful, and the results were shelved for a while. At the same time, S Kavitha was working a PhD under Chandra on using microbes to enhance the production of vitamins. When they were about to finish their PhDs, the commercial idea was evident to Anant and Kavitha: nanofibers with microbes in them. As a platform technology, it had many uses.Chandra had asked them to focus on agriculture first. “Agriculture is a multifaceted research area,” says Chandra. “It has opportunities in different directions.” Anant and Kavitha set up FiBSOL to commercialise their products, the first of which is a water-soluble and biodegradeable nanofiber. It has bacteria that can enhance the fixing of nitrogen in the soil, but the technology is useful to embed any kind of bacteria. “I have not seen such companies before,” says Chandra. “A lot of PhD work is basic academic work. Students have not had the motivation to apply their research.”With entrepreneurship being the current Zeitgeist, students are motivated to translate their own work, even if it means going a considerable distance. Parul Ganju did her PhD on skin biology at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi, working under its former director Rajesh Gokhale. Ganju was interested in the disease vitiligo, also known as leukoderma, characterized by white patches on the skin. The disease is often confused with leprosy. “I was surprised to learn how common it was,” says Ganju.During her PhD, Ganju identified metabolic pathways that are relevant to the development of the disease. There was no drug development programme for the disease anywhere, and Ganju decided to take the plunge based on her work.“This work cannot be done within the academia,” says Ganju. She got some molecules from Srinivas Reddy, a scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory, that showed efficacy against some targets in the pathways she identified. She moved to the NCL Venture centre, an incubation facility right next to NCL, and set up Ahammune Biosciences along with K Natarajan, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.The company got a Rs 50-lakh grant from the Department of Biotechnology. It has raised angel investments of Rs 8 crore. Ahammune is now doing the preclinical work on its patented molecules. Around 2% of the world population are supposed to have the disease. In some parts of India like Gujarat, the prevalence goes up to 8%. There is no treatment, and so the market is wide open for the company.Like IISc and IIT Madras, NCL Venture Centre has all that is required to push research startups quickly on the path to commercialization. The value of such incubation centres have not been lost on the students working for their PhD in the institutions nearby. Research startups are now doing something that has not been seen so far in the country: rapid translation of research from the lab to the market.