Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS), Delhi have signed an MoU to establish ‘ILBS-IITD Collaborative Platform’ initiating wide-ranging collaborations involving academic, research, product, process and human resource development.

The MoU was signed by Prof V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi and Dr. SK Sarin, Director, ILBS, Delhi.

The mission of the ILBS-IITD Collaborative Platform is to help in critical identification of the problems faced by the practicing doctors in metabolic and liver diseases, ranging from the primary health center to tertiary care super-specialty hospitals and to initiate the work jointly by the engineering and medical teams for sustainable solutions.

The scope of collaboration focusses on liver diseases and encompasses (i) to make intramural funding for the projects in both IIT Delhi and ILBS, to initiate the collaborative research among different medical and engineering disciplines of these two institutions (ii) To allow registered Ph.D students of both institutions to attend lectures and courses relevant to their area of research in each other’s institutions and (iii) imitating joint Ph.D supervision and developing Technology Business Incubator (TBI).

The thrust areas of collaboration include (i) Use of Artificial Intelligence in Liver & Biliary diseases(ii) Bio-sensor development (iii) Computational biology and Big Data (iv) Material Sciences, Liver Dialysis Membranes and Machines (iv) 3D Bio-printing, Bio-artificial Liver (v) Process such as regenerative tissue growth (vi) Use of nano-science in diagnosis and effective drug delivery (vii) Applied principles and design concepts of engineering to healthcare and (viii) Establishment of an Incubation Center at ILBS, with the help of FITT (IIT Delhi)

Speaking of the MoU with IIT Delhi, Dr. SK Sarin, Director, ILBS, Delhi, said, “Use of computational tools, AI and biosensors are of paramount importance in real-time inference and non-invasively from a large amount of diagnostic data. ‘Team ILBS’ with data of more than 200,000 liver patients is most suited and eager for rapid strides and joint ventures with IIT Delhi.”

Welcoming the MoU with ILBS, Prof V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi, termed it as mutually beneficial partnership between the two eminent institutions having complementary expertise.

He added, “Developing specialized human resources in interdisciplinary domains bridging engineering and medicine faculty to solve some of the challenges faced by the health sector in the country will be an important goal of this Collaborative Platform. IIT Delhi researchers will bring their expertise on machine learning and AI technologies to solve some of the outstanding problems in the area of liver and biliary medicine.”