Bangalore — Remidio Innovative Solutions has received a grant from the Gates Foundation to advance its Oculomics platform, which uses retinal imaging and AI to detect signs of systemic disease, for maternal health applications in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The initiative will focus on improving early risk assessment for major pregnancy complications, including pre-eclampsia (PE), anemia and gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). The program will be carried out across countries in Africa and India, regions that together bear the overwhelming share of the global maternal and perinatal disease burden.
The scale of the problem is stark. There are approximately 2 million stillbirths worldwide each year, equivalent to one every 16 seconds, and 84% of these occur in LMICs. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, particularly pre-eclampsia, are among the leading placental causes of these deaths. The same conditions are also among the leading causes of maternal mortality globally, contributing to an estimated 42,000 maternal deaths annually. Gestational diabetes mellitus affects approximately one in six pregnancies worldwide, with a disproportionately high burden falling on these same populations. Together, these conditions are major contributors to stillbirth, preterm birth, and long-term cardiovascular and metabolic complications that affect both mothers and their children.
“The women most at risk from pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes are often the least likely to reach a laboratory or a specialist in time,” said Dr. Anand Sivaraman, Chief Executive Officer and Founding Director, Remidio. “A retinal image takes seconds and can be captured by a frontline worker with minimal training. This grant allows us to ask a clear question with real rigour: can the platform already deployed widely for diabetic retinopathy also help identify pregnancies at risk, in the places where that information is needed most.”
The biological link between retinal microvascular changes and systemic vascular and metabolic disease is now well established. Yet in the primary care and community settings where maternal mortality is concentrated, the diagnostic tools that currently support early risk stratification, namely complex laboratory assays, biochemical biomarkers and Doppler-based assessments, are largely unavailable at the point of care, requiring laboratory infrastructure, trained personnel and referral pathways that simply do not exist for most pregnant women in LMICs. Non-invasive retinal imaging, by contrast, is quick, easy to perform by frontline health workers with minimal training, and inherently scalable, making it uniquely suited to bringing advanced risk assessment to the front lines of antenatal care.
“The retina is the only place in the body where blood vessels can be observed directly and without an invasive procedure,” said Dr. Divya Rao, Chief Medical Officer and Head of AI, Remidio. “The microvascular and metabolic changes associated with pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes leave detectable signatures. Having built and validated our retinal AI on a very large and diverse image dataset, our task now is to prove these signals hold up in community antenatal care, in the hands of frontline workers, across different populations. Evidence, not assumption, will decide where this proves useful.”
Remidio’s portable, smartphone-based retinal imaging platform is already widely deployed across primary care and community screening programs for diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and AMD. The grant will extend this platform into maternal health, with implementation across partner sites in Africa and India.