CHENNAI: Four youngsters who had designed a cost-effective multi-purpose syringe pump have begun work on making it commercially feasible.

T.V. Dhananjayan was a student at the Sai Ram Engineering College with K. Aravind, S. Karthikeyan and R. Sathya Narayanan when their project was selected for the L-RAMP Young Innovator Award. He has quit an info tech job to take up an entrepreneurship course at IIT. He is working on a portable ECG machine, he told presspersons on Monday.

The multi-purpose pump serves both as a syringe pump that can deliver high concentration drugs over long duration and a pump for infusing saline and glucose mixed with drugs.

He hopes that a marketable product would be ready in a few months, after which they would consider applying for patents.

The pump has been tested for efficiency in delivery of accurate volumes but testing with drugs is yet to commence. The prototype has been produced at a cost of Rs. 16,000 and the young inventors are confident that mass production could bring down the rate to Rs. 7,000. The low-cost pump would be particularly useful in rural hospitals, they feel.

Existing models cost upward of Rs. 20,000 and do not combine the two functions found together in the multi-purpose pump, according to a press release.