MIT, India Launch Health Sciences Institute

Wade Roush11/19/07

In New Delhi today, officials from the Indian government and MIT announced an agreement to create a new Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) in India, modeled after the interdisciplinary Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). HST director Martha Gray and M. K. Bhan, secretary of the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology’s Department of Biotechnology, signed a letter of intent for the partnership, which will involve an exchange of faculty fellows. The “translational” part of the institute’s name signifies its mission to translate basic scientific and technological advances into improvements in healthcare. “THSTI has the potential to be a second success story that could revolutionize medicine in India the same way the [Indian Institute of Technology] schools revolutionized engineering and science,” said Shiladitya Sengupta, assistant professor of medicine and an HST faculty member at Harvard Medical School, in a statement about the new institute. MIT was part of a consortium that helped the Indian government to found the Indian Institute of Technology campus in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1959.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.