Digital health company Qure.ai has been awarded an $8 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to strengthen health equity and improve access to diagnostics in underserved communities worldwide.
The funding will be used to create a large, open-source, multi-modal database designed to accelerate innovation in disease prevention and early detection. The database will combine anonymised clinical histories with medical imaging such as chest X-rays, thoracic ultrasound scans and high-resolution CT images, along with cough and lung sound recordings and relevant laboratory or biological markers. Once developed, the platform will be made available to researchers and innovators globally to build, test and refine new AI-based healthcare solutions.
A key focus of the grant is the development of AI-powered point-of-care ultrasound tools to enable earlier detection of tuberculosis (TB) and pneumonia two leading causes of infectious disease deaths in low-resource settings. TB claims an estimated 1.23 million lives every year, while pneumonia is responsible for nearly 2 million deaths annually, including around 700,000 children under the age of five. Both conditions are highly treatable when diagnosed early.
Commenting on the development, Prashant Warier, Founder and CEO of Qure.ai, said the company has spent the last decade using AI-enabled imaging to bring TB screening to some of the world’s most remote regions, from sub-Saharan Africa to rural Southeast Asia. “Our solutions have cut diagnostic timelines from weeks to just one or two days, often without the need for an on-site clinician. With support from the Gates Foundation, we are now poised to scale this impact and reach many more people,” he said.
Dr. Shibu Vijayan, Chief Medical Officer Global Health at Qure.ai, noted that advances in artificial intelligence and digital health can help address critical gaps in healthcare delivery, making high-quality diagnostics accessible to clinics and frontline health workers regardless of geography.
Dr. Justy Antony Chiramal, Project Lead and Clinical Director for Global Health Innovation at Qure.ai, said the grant builds on the company’s longstanding public health work and its mission to push the boundaries of AI for global health. “By bringing together TB, pneumonia and broader lung health priorities particularly for children in low- and middle-income countries we aim to address preventable deaths. A child dies from pneumonia every 43 seconds, a loss that is both unacceptable and avoidable,” he said.
Qure.ai’s AI solutions are currently deployed across more than 105 countries and 4,800 healthcare sites, supporting the detection and management of tuberculosis, lung cancer and critical neurological conditions such as stroke.
