New Delhi: Gurgaon-based UnivLabs Technologies is India’s first company to indigenously design and manufacture a full-fledged 4K Endoscope Tower, whose performance is at par with the tower that India imports from global giants and it has been built at three fourth the cost of the competitors’ product.
All the individual components of the Tower like the Body Cavity Illuminator, Co2 Insufflator, Hysteroscopy Pump, Laparoscopy Pump have been conceived and manufactured by the company in India and the most advanced 4K Camera has been developed under an MOU with a Japanese imaging company. The individual components have widely been used in the local & international market for the last 5 years and now the entire tower is available at a very affordable rate with many new useful features which are not there in the existing towers.
What happens when the medical devices created in the developed countries for the people with per capita income of $50000 are sold in countries like India where the per capita income is barely $5000? The result is a very high cost of acquisition of routine medical devices for the hospitals and an even higher cost of healthcare services for people. This insight led to the birth of UnivLabs Technologies, which indigenously designs world-class medical devices from the scratch in its R&D Labs and manufactures the same at its ISO-13485 certified factory.
There is an urgent need for a widespread adaptation of the latest medical devices to improve surgery scheduling challenges in big as well as small hospitals and at the same time to give an advantage of key- hole surgery in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. To enable this, UnivLabs along with its technologically superior products has introduced the ‘Pay per use’ model wherein hospitals can own the Endoscope tower with an initial investment of one-third of the total cost thus reducing early ownership cost. UnivLabs has also innovated the industry’s first & unique service delivery system “OBSR” (One Button Service Request) model for proactive service and maintenance. Traditionally, service request of the equipment is initiated by the customers with multiple follow-ups. UnivLabs has reversed this service model with its cloud-connected Endoscope Tower, wherein for any service issues, hospital staff has to just push  the OBSR button on the tower and call us for any technical help.
With an affordable product and unique service delivery model UnivLabs has an aggressive goal to install 5000 4K endoscope towers in the next 3 years to give a major boost to the adaptation of minimally invasive surgeries across India. Dr. (prof) Anil Mandhani, Key opinion leader of UnivLabs and an accomplished uro-onco, robotic & kidney transplant surgeon says, “This would be a significant step forward in diluting monopoly of foreign companies providing towers. Cost is a major issue even in the big corporate hospitals, wherein few towers are shared among various surgeons restraining their freedom to choose minimally invasive surgery over open surgery. Very few of the existing towers have 4K vision monitors, to which surgeons look at and do the surgery. Due to the exorbitant cost of buying or replacing the existing towers, many surgeons continue to compromise with the quality of image they are looking at. The 4K system & monitor would improve the way a surgeon visualizes the surgical field and in turn the outcome of laparoscopic surgery.”.
Sunil Singh, Founder and CEO of UnivLabs has a much broader dream to build national capacity for a variety of medical devices and make India self-sufficient in medical devices. He says “Considering the scale of our country and population, we shall localize the design and manufacture of most of the medical devices. Our stress should not be only to build innovative devices but all devices for which India depends on imports, truly flagging up the ‘Make in India’ vision”.
He adds “While traditionally the VC fund has flown into healthcare services, it’s opportune to start investing in healthcare manufacturing as India and other developing countries are building national capacity to handle future exigencies in healthcare like the current COVID pandemic. Almost 85% of India’s market for medical devices is catered to by international companies and there is a big opportunity for homegrown companies to flourish in this field.”
UnivLabs has multiple patents applied and granted in a short duration of 5 years since its inception. The research-driven efforts of UnivLabs are acknowledged by the Department of Biotechnology, under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Electronics, and Ministry of MSME. This has led to UnivLabs receiving a substantial grant from the Department of Biotechnology for the development of surgical vision technology.

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