World's First Large Scale Diagnostics

Digvijay is an alumnus of IIT (BHU) Varanasi in India and later attended the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering for Bioengineering Innovation and Design. He is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland. He co-founded Drizzle Health to address fundamental gaps he identified in the field of medical diagnostics.

He identified a "garbage in, garbage out" problem in diagnostics. He realized that most tests fail not because the detection method (like PCR) is flawed, but because the sample itself is poor or too small. He saw that by improving the sample - specifically by concentrating it - test performance could improve dramatically, sometimes by over 1600%.

Drizzle Health uses proprietary polymer and fluidics technology to concentrate pathogens from large volumes of fluid into small samples. For example, they can take 100 liters of fluid and concentrate the pathogens into a tiny sample that can be read by existing devices like microscopes or PCR machines. This allows for detecting very low concentrations of pathogens that would otherwise be missed.

They initially started the company focusing on Tuberculosis (TB) diagnostics during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Digvijay soon realized the same sampling problem existed across many other fields - Typhoid, Malaria, and especially Food Safety. This led them to expand their focus to "Large Scale Diagnostics," applying their technology to test food supply chains and environmental surveillance.

Digvijay envisions a shift from reactive to preventive diagnostics. He believes we need "Large Diagnostic Models" that test air, water, and food reliability at scale. By detecting pathogens in the environment (like in a building's HVAC system or a food supply chain) before they reach humans, society can prevent outbreaks before people get sick, rather than just diagnosing them afterwards.