Eye on Jhajjar campus as healthcare hub, IIT Delhi renews tie-up with AIIMS

IIT Delhi and AIIMS renew collaboration to start joint PhD programme and create healthcare hub at Jhajjar campus. The campus will focus on patient-specific drug development, performance enhancement for paralympians, medical implants, diagnostics, AI/ML in digital healthcare and more. It will also offer courses and certificate programs for skilling the workforce.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here have renewed an existing collaboration on research and academics as well as announced plans to start a joint PhD programme.

The 2018 memorandum of understanding between the institutes was renewed at a workshop on Monday at IIT Delhi’s Hauz Khas campus. It comes at a time when the institute is preparing for its new campus at Jhajjar, Haryana.

At the event, Director Rangan Banerjee said IIT Delhi wants the Jhajjar campus, which is likely to be ready in three years, to be a healthcare hub. “We need to create a new model of collaboration between medical, engineering and science... that will hopefully be replicated by other institutions,” he added.

AIIMS Director M. Srinivas said that as the country is looking towards becoming atmanirbhar (self-reliant), there is a fresh need to innovate, design and develop. “This cannot happen only in medical institutions. We have to sit together, work together, design together, evaluate, and go to the trials. That is where the roles of AIIMS and IIT come together. This is definitely a requirement for the country right now,” he added.

According to IIT Delhi, the Jhajjar campus will be “the country’s first-of-its-kind R&D Centre for Patient-Specific Drug Development for Cancer Treatment and medical equipment technologies”.

It added that the Jhajjar campus will also work in the areas of performance enhancement for paralympians and sports injury prevention and rehabilitation; medical implants, diagnostics, device design and development; and application of AI/ML in digital healthcare along with medical imaging.

The campus plans to offer many new courses and certificate programs for skilling the workforce for these futuristic technologies, the institute said.