Prashant Warier, Founder & CEO- Qure.aiAI startup Qure.ai has secured a multimillion-dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to advance AI–driven diagnostics for preventable infectious diseases, including tuberculosis (TB) and pneumonia, with a focus on under-resourced regions.
The grant will enable the company to develop a large, multi-modal database to steer innovation in lung health diagnostics, it said in a statement on Thursday.
“In a bid to reach the unreachable we have innovated our way around the world over the last 10 years, taking AI-enabled X-ray to some of the remotest regions of sub-Saharan Africa, to the heights of Everest and depths of rural Southeast Asia, tackling the detection and diagnosis of TB. Now, with this grant from the Gates Foundation, we are excited to leverage this expertise further to scale and reach more people,” states Prashant Warier, founder and CEO of Qure.ai.
The database will support World Health Organization lung-health diagnostic pathways and integrate non-identifiable clinical histories, medical imaging data such as chest X-rays, thoracic ultrasound and high-resolution CT scans, along with cough and lung sound recordings and laboratory or biological markers.
The effort aims to assist researchers and innovators globally to develop new AI models to improve early disease detection and prevention.
A key focus of the grant is the development of AI-enabled point-of-care ultrasound algorithms to support early detection of TB and pneumonia: two of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
While both conditions are curable if identified early, TB causes an estimated 1.23 million deaths annually, while pneumonia claims nearly 2 million lives each year, including around 700,000 children under the age of five, according to data from UNICEF.
At present, Qure.ai operates across more than 105 countries and 4,800 sites worldwide, supporting the identification and management of TB, lung cancer and neurocritical conditions such as stroke.
The firm has offices in New York, London, Dubai and Mumbai.
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