Medtech innovators rely heavily on biomedical engineering to come up with solutions that improve the management, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. Many notable achievements have been in the engineering of synthetic body replacements, regenerating new body materials using biological building blocks and engineering medical systems that are replicable beyond the human scope.
As the world moves to become more gender-inclusive the biomedical engineering industry has not been left behind. In our first interview for the March into Woman History Series, we feature Dr. June Madete a biomedical engineer with special interest and expertise in collections, analysis and interpretation of gait data using various motion analysis software and hardware. She shares with us her journey as a biomedical engineer in Kenya.
Who is Dr. June Madete:
I am an enthusiastic and dynamic engineer, researcher and senior lecturer, with over 13 years of experience in biomedical engineering training and research. My specialty is biomechanics; looking at the body as a machine. I received my Ph.D. in medical engineering specializing in Biomechanics, motion capture, imaging studies, and patient data collection and I seek to develop biomedical engineering in Africa through knowledge and skill transfer
What inspired you to take up a career in Biomedical Engineering?
At first, I wanted to become a surgeon but I did not manage to get admitted into medicine. This is when I decided to do something affiliated with the area. At the time it was a new field but I loved it immediately and was sure this is what I wanted to study.
What is the best part of being a woman in the MedTech Industry?
It’s really brilliant getting to be the one to encourage the next generation of women coming into the industry, as a male-dominated field, I like that I am in the picture to show them that they are also welcome.
What are some personal challenges you have faced as you try to grow as a Biomedical Engineer
Being a new field, trying to start it in Kenya has been challenging, there is no known scheme of service for a recent graduate in Biomedical Engineering and the boards and the policies in place in the field are also not clear as to what a BME is.
From your own experience do you think there has been an improvement in gender inclusivity in the Biomedical Engineering field in Africa?
The field has always been attractive to women from an early age, there is a high admission rate compared to other fields. I suppose it is the Biomedical aspect that makes it attractive to them. I think it can improve but we started on the right foot.
How can we be more gender-inclusive as we try to engineer an innovative end to end health solutions in the ecosystem?
I think most of us as in the industry are free Sensitive to the gender balance and a lot is being done to be inclusive. We could try and start from an early age and encourage innovation from an early age and that will cascade to the higher levels and we will have more women innovating.
What opportunities are available for women looking to enter the biomedical engineering space?
I think the question is not what is available, all are available, every opportunity available to men is available to women, it’s just for them to present themselves and be competitive enough to enter the space. It is my role and the role of other women in the industry to mentor and encourage those coming into the field to give them a chance.
Tell us about the work you do at the African Biomedical Engineering Consortium?
I coordinate the activities that are done by the universities and students from the Consortium.
African Biomedical Engineering Consortium (ABEC) is a consortium of universities and their partners that was founded in August 2012 whose main objective is to create a platform for building and nurturing academic, technical, innovation and entrepreneurship competencies needed to develop a robust and dynamic biomedical device sector for improved healthcare.
With this in mind, ABEC has a mission to serve as a multi-disciplinary focal point for articulating healthcare challenges, promoting excellence in human capital development and research, encouraging entrepreneurship among students and researchers, mobilizing resources and stimulating partnerships among key stakeholders in medical devices sector.
Villgro Kenya, an impact investor, and business incubator has awarded $20,000 each to three innovative health startups based in East Africa.
The three early-stage, hardware-based health innovations include A-lite a non-invasive neonatal vein locater, Kijenzi 3D printing service for medical replacements and Wekebere a prenatal diagnostic device – these innovations were selected from a list of 38 applicants.
Villgro Kenya will offer financial support, high-touch mentorship through a structured program, access to networks of healthcare and product development experts and connections to investors and strategic partners.
“With the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution in healthcare, hardware innovations continue to show great great potential in driving UHC ini Africa. Their ability to provide access to quality healthcare services to the underserved continues to front them as good invesments for health impact in Africa. We are happy to partner with all these organizations we hope to support their innovations on their journey to scale.” Dr. Robert Karanja CEO Villgro Kenya.
Wekebere is a Ugandan-based social enterprise that combines connected devices with data analytics to increase access to care, provide personalized feedback to mothers, and help doctors earlier predict and manage pregnancy complications in low resource settings.
Kijenzi Kenya has developed a 3D printing service that ensures health centers in low-income communities are able to produce medical equipment replacement parts when they need it. This helps reduce procurement timelines and increases efficiency and access to care while delivering quality at a lower cost.
A-lite is a Ugandan startup that has developed a low cost, non-invasive vein locater that aims to decrease the risk of tissue death, increased trauma while reducing the work burden of clinicians associated with locating barely visible veins among children.
“On behalf of A-Lite Uganda Limited, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Villgro Kenya for accepting to support our innovation. The $20,000 financial support means so much to us, and we are ready to utilize this grant to clinically test our product, refine our device’s technology so as to acquire relevant device approvals, and validate our business model. We believe that our innovation will have a huge impact in terms of addressing challenges with intravenous drug administration.” said Julius Mubiru CEO of A-lite.
The QMS ISO13485 Medical Diagnostics Masterclass was held on 29th February 2020 at the Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Centre at Kenyatta University.
The Masterclass brought together ecosystem builders, biomedical engineers, and hardware innovators to give an overview of the Medical Device Quality Management System, take participants through the Medical Device Product Development and shed more light on the Design Control Process.
The session was facilitated by Dr. June Madete, Biomedical Engineer at Kenyatta University & ABEC and Dr. Kenneth Chelule, CTO Medical Device Regulations at Greyhound Consulting.
To understand what innovators should look out for during their design process, Dr. June Madete took participants through Risk Analysis and explained the process of comparing estimated risk against given risk criteria to determine the acceptability of the risk.
She also highlighted it is the full responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure their product is compliant to regulatory requirements.
Dr. Chelule emphasized on the need for innovators to document every stage or iteration made during the innovation journey as this will make the process of regulatory approvals easier.
Key takeaways from the Masterclass were Innovators need to develop a product that
Villgro Kenya aims to impact not only innovative health start-ups but also grow the ecosystem in terms of growth in investments. In the second part of an interview with Paul Belknap, we gain insights on the need for more homegrown angel investments to catapult innovations within the ecosystem.
90% of capital injected into startups in East Africa comes from the West. While we have successful entrepreneurs within our borders they are wary to invest in start-ups and instead choose to invest in other sectors like real estate. This is majorly due to the lack of strong regulatory measures, unpredictable timelines and their traditional understanding of investment which makes investing in the innovations seem like throwing money into a hole.
Undoubtedly Kenya has been named as a frontier for innovations in Africa however, we still need to do more to show homegrown investors the value the world sees in innovation and convince them to put more money in the ecosystem to move the innovations to the next stage.
Q: Villgro Kenya has contributed to the health innovation ecosystem largely through its investments into early-stage companies and incubation programs. However, there is a gap in funding startups to scale, what can be done to mitigate this?
P: We can’t solve this problem by ourselves but one of the things that we saw in India was that there were so many more complementary sources of funding available for early-stage entrepreneurs. Government grants, angel investors and other grant funding/more investors with an early stage appetite, we need more of that.
One of the things Villgro Kenya has identified that we need to be able to fund startups to a greater extent in their journey than we needed to in India because there is a lack of complementary funding. On the order of $150k would help those companies move to the plate where they would start to match up with some of the investors that are more active in the ecosystem, some would come in the form of co-investment with early-stage investors as well.
Increasing our ability to fund companies and invest in companies is important but we can’t do it all by ourselves. If you look at things that Kenya & Uganda needs to work on, the government can play a role in terms of doing investments/grants into early-stage companies.
I don’t know that any government is great at investing in early-stage companies. The more successful ones have done a funds approach where they are allocated a set of resources and they pick management to do those investments for them.
There is a real need for more angel investment into startups in the ecosystem. Angel investment or the same individuals can consider investing in funds interested in tackling the pre-seed stage of funding under $150k- 500k.
I’ve talked to a few people who are frustrated with investors seeing real estate as the safe bet. Getting people excited into investing in entrepreneurship particularly the health sector seems to be lagging which is contributed by the fact that there have been very few successes in the health sector making people more cautious in investing into it.
Villgro Kenya hit the ground running this year with site visits to portfolio companies across East Africa. These visits help entrepreneurs in their business growth and development and provides a real time assessment of their progress while also giving us an opportunity to identify areas where Villgro Kenya can add strategic value.
KMET/CMHI broaden their reach across the Counties
The Center for Maternal Health Innovations (CMHI) continues to build a strong presence in the counties, especially in maternal emergencies such as Postpartum Hemorrhage through their Every Second Matters for Mothers and Babies – Uterine Balloon TamponadeTM (ESM-UBT).
Rob Beyer Villgro Kenya Executive Chair is actively supporting the Kisumu-based team as they position CMHI for accelerated growth and impact. CMHI continues to make gains in the country as market leaders in maternal health interventions, leveraging the success of ESM-UBT. The partnership between KMET/CMHI, Villgro Kenya, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School aims to develop a quality holistic Postpartum Hemorrhage Emergency Care Kit which will streamline emergency maternal care in delivery facilities across Kenya.
MamaOpe develop strategy their stage of product development and intellectual property
Dr. Robert Karanja Villgro Kenya CEO, led MamaOpe in a session on introspection in order to chart a strategic way forward for the year including the development of their annual operations plan for 2020, while reviewing fundraising strategies, intellectual property vis a vis their progress in product development.
clinicPesa Set to Launch Pilot
It’s all systems go for clinicPesa’s pilot. The innovative healthcare financing platform for the uninsured in Uganda has successfully signed a contract with MTN Uganda.
clinicPesa is now fully integrated with MTN and available within the MTN mobile money menu, the clinicPesa website and clinicPesa Android application.
Portfolio Manager Gibson Muriuki is often in Uganda working with the team on business model validation and their fundraising strategy. The team has expanded with 25 new hires, who will help fast track the healthcare onboarding process.
clinicPesa CEO appreciates Villgro Kenya – “Through Villgro Kenya’s support, we designed a B2C pilot product with the aim of testing the employer’s willingness to guarantee employees for medical credit and willingness to have savings as a benefit by employees.”