The Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Challenge’s first cohort is getting ready for their upcoming visit to Toronto, where they will continue their implementation phase through activities targeting business development, expanding entrepreneurial networks and facilitating exposure to potential investors.
In the meantime, the HENT Communications team caught up with the ventures from the first HENT Challenge cohort to learn more about the origins of their companies, what they’ve learned to date, and what is coming up next…
Conrad Tankou was working as a medical doctor in a rural community when he first witnessed the health challenges faced by rural residents. These areas were known to suffer the highest disease burden of breast and cervical cancers, with one of the biggest challenges being the ability to access specialized healthcare services for those diagnoses. Tankou noted that some of the reasons behind this issue included scarcity of qualified medical specialists, absence of adapted medical equipment, and low levels of health literacy among the population-at-risk with regards to these cancers.
To combat these issues, Tankou started GICMED, a series of innovative MedTech solutions. Among these solutions, the team has developed a digital pathology system combined with pathology sample collection devices to deliver a patient-clinic interactive telemedicine platform that is enhancing diagnosis and engaging patients. Alongside his team, Tankou’s solutions provide rapid and inexpensive point of care diagnoses for all women, no matter their location or social status.
What is the accomplishment to date that your team is most proud of?
Since its launch, GICMED has successfully developed, piloted and clinically validated their solutions to serve as a solid foundation to scale-up and positively impact millions of women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Their team has carried out 23 pilots to date in collaboration with various health facilities and have reached over 10,000 women.
If you could give advice to another founder getting started, what would that be?
“Everyone can think of a great idea, but few are courageous enough to execute. You should be passionate about what you want to build, start small and early, fail fast (everyone fails, it is normal), learn quickly from your failures, refine your concept, then move faster.”
Looking forward, GICMED plans on reaching 100,000 women in 2024 and scaling to other African countries within the next 3-5 years to eventually hit a milestone of 1 million women helped. While these efforts start with strongly establishing their current market, they look forward to progressively building partnerships which will enable them to scale broadly into new areas.
You can learn more about GICMED
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