Every parent wants to make their child proud, and Aditya Kulkarni and Arun B Papaiah are no different. Only that their daughters – Kulkarni has a two-and-a-half-year-old, and Papaiah’s girls are five and one-and-a-half years old respectively – can be super proud.
In fact, the girls are a constant source of inspiration for the innovation that the two men are toiling over at their two-floor Aten Porus Lifesciences (APL) office in Bengaluru, and its US offshoot – Oraxion Therapeutics. Srinivasan Namala, the CEO of Hyderabad-based Porus Labs, is the third co-founder, who pumped in $1 million into this startup and gave them a cushy start.
They are developing drugs for rare diseases or ‘orphan diseases’ – 350 million of the world’s population suffers from them, of which, up to 70 percent are newborns to teenagers, yet less than five percent of these ailments have clinically-proven treatment. Seven thousand of such diseases are known, and most are fatal.
“Prasanna Kumar Shirol runs the Organization for Rare Diseases in India. His daughter – she is nine or 10 – is suffering from a rare metabolic disorder called Pompe. ‘Probably, a cure for Pompe is on their list, so you need to put pressure on these guys’, he told his daughter while introducing us,” Kulkarni says.
These words hit hard, as Papaiah puts it, “It breaks our hearts to see our kids just catching cold or fever, and here are kids who are fighting for life. We are fathers, we feel much more.”
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