In a country, where late diagnosis often determines survival, Anirban Palit has dedicated his work to the belief that healthcare must reach people before disease becomes irreversible. As the co-founder and Managing Director of Pragmatech Healthcare Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Palit has helped design preventive diagnostic solutions tailored for India's healthcare realities. These solutions prioritise access, dignity, and early intervention. His work addresses two of India's most persistent silent killers, heart disease and cervical cancer.
With over 10 years of experience in the molecular diagnostics industry, Anirban Palit spent a significant part of his career at Roche Diagnostics India, where he worked closely with cutting-edge diagnostic technologies. That experience also exposed that many advanced screening tools never reach the people who need them most. Palit holds a Master's degree in Biotechnology from Macquarie University, Sydney, and an Executive MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.
His professional strength lies in sales and marketing, but his larger contribution has been translating complex diagnostic science into solutions that work in low-resource and high-need settings. At Pragmatech Healthcare Solutions, Palit and his three co-founders set out to solve health problems specific to India. Their approach focuses on diagnostic strategies used in developed countries that cannot be directly applied to India without rethinking cost, infrastructure, and social barriers.
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The idea for Cervicheck began with loss. Anirban Palit and his co-founders lost a close housemate to cervical cancer. Her symptoms were mild and easily dismissed as fatigue, back pain, leg cramps, and weight loss. By the time cervical cancer was diagnosed, it was too late. Cervical cancer, caused primarily by the human papillomavirus (HPV), can remain asymptomatic for years. Despite being one of the most preventable cancers, a woman in India dies from cervical cancer every eight minutes. Yet fewer than one per cent of Indian women undergo regular screening, far below the World Health Organization's 70 per cent target.
Screening often requires travel, invasive pelvic exams, and interaction with unfamiliar healthcare settings. These factors discourage millions of women from ever being tested. Determined to change this, Palit left his role at Roche Diagnostics. Along with co-founder Sayantani Pramanik and the Pragmatech team, he spent four and a half years building, validating, and licensing a solution that would work for Indian women, not against them.
The result was Cervicheck, India's first clinically validated at-home self-sampling kit for cervical cancer screening.
The kit allows women to collect samples privately and safely, without invasive procedures or hospital visits. Its accuracy is comparable to clinic-based tests, but the experience is designed to reduce fear, stigma, and discomfort. Through partnerships with NGOs, CSR programmes, and public health initiatives, the kit has already reached thousands of women, from urban low-income communities in Chennai to remote villages in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. Education and awareness are integral to every screening effort, with healthcare workers explaining what cervical cancer is, why early detection matters, and how treatment can save lives.
Today, the kit is available to consumers at around Rs 1,700, including testing. For large-scale public health programmes, the cost can drop to as little as Rs 100 per unit, less than the cost of travelling to a screening camp. The team is also developing a point-of-care diagnostic test to detect precancerous lesions, strengthening early intervention even further.
Cervicheck gained national attention when Anirban Palit appeared on Shark Tank India, bringing women's preventive healthcare into mainstream conversation. The long term goal is for every woman being able to screen herself at home as easily as a pregnancy test.
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