Our story

The Covid19 pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities of our health care system. With hospitals running short on ventilators to serve patients in need, doctors were forced to make tough triage decisions on who gets to live. A team of biomedical engineers, clinicians, and researchers based at Harvard and MIT came together to develop a much-needed solution to increasing the respiratory care capacity of hospitals. Led by Dr. Shriya Srinivasan, the team developed the iSAVE, a device that was well-suited to meet the technical needs, but holistically took into consideration the user needs of clinicians.

While the iSAVE represented a collaborative effort to solve the immediate challenge at hand, it led to the realization that medical equipment scarcity was an issue long before Covid19 due to the high cost of medical equipment. The spirit of this effort stems from a deeper motivation to address inequities and inadequacies in healthcare through innovative, cost-effective, and patient-centered engineering.

With a mission to innovate and deploy cost-effective medical devices in the global health context, Project Prana Foundation was born. The foundation was guided by the visionary leadership and support of Professor Robert Langer, the founder of Moderna, and Professor Giovanni Traverso, a well-known medical technology innovator, and gastroenterologist.

The impact of this device is dependent on how many patients actually have access to it and therefore as a foundation we found our initial responsibilities to receive regulatory approval, find partners to manufacture the device, distribute it to the hospitals, educate doctors and nurses on how to use it, and, potentially most importantly, get continuous feedback for further device development and small course corrections on our journey.

For device development, digital monitoring capabilities, and manufacturing, we partnered with IndVentr, a start-up consortium based in Bangalore, India, focused on frugal innovation to meet the arising needs of the Indian subcontinent. Led by Mr. Prakash Bare, the team developed various low-cost ventilator models and partnered with the Project Prana Foundation to further develop the iSAVE. We are currently working on hospital and governmental outreach in India and other countries that are in need of respiratory care, training doctors and nurses virtually and on-site on how to use the devices, collecting donations and funds to reduce costs for government hospitals, and partnering with large scale distributors to prepare hospitals to be better equipped in the future.