Our Story

Our beginning

After years of cancer research in England, Dr. Pawan Mehrotra returned to India in 2012 to work on new breast-cancer therapies at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. In the oncology OPD he kept noticing women draping their saree to one side. An elderly couple explained: the wife had undergone a mastectomy, and the permanent void troubled her far more than the treatment had. The husband asked a simple question — why doesn’t the hospital offer a solution? That question never left him.

Diving without knowing how to swim

A cancer biologist with no manufacturing background, Dr. Mehrotra decided in December 2013 to build an affordable, accessible solution for every woman in India who has to undergo mastectomy. He resigned on 7 February 2014, the day his daughter Aarna was born — and the company is named after her. From the start, patients were the innovators and he the facilitator: Poorti was co-developed with the women who use it.

Four years of iteration

With the guidance of Prof. P.V.M. Rao of IIT Delhi and the partnership of Mr. Divas Gupta, the Sampoorti-Poorti system took shape through four years of research with support from BIRAC, FITT–IIT Delhi, THSTI, Tata Trusts’ Social Alpha, Venture Center–NCL, SIIC–IIT Kanpur, Pune International Centre and many hospitals and NGOs. The result: an indigenous, patented manufacturing process and an in-house production plant.

A social enterprise

Aarna Biomedical Products was incorporated on 17 March 2017 with three aims — affordable, high-quality, user-centric biomedical products; fairly paid, meaningful work; and proof that a social enterprise can be financially sustainable. After eighteen months of patient use without issues, Poorti was pilot-launched on 1 January 2018 and launched nationally in March 2019 by officials of the Government of India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.