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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Andrew N. Wilner, MD: Welcome to Medscape. I'm Dr Andrew Wilner, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr William Li, president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Welcome, Dr Li.

William W. Li, MD: Thank you, Dr Wilner. It's a pleasure to be here.

Wilner: Thanks for joining us. I saw that you are one of the coauthors of a paper this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that has to do with angiogenesis and COVID-19. This is a pretty hot topic. Because you're one of the authors, you know more about it than anybody else. I'm glad to have you here to speak with us. So tell us about the paper. What did you find?

Li: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I, like many scientists, immediately started to pivot from whatever we were doing at the time to trying to tackle this enigma which, in 200,000 years of human history, humans have never encountered.

There's been so much confusion and some misinformation. I think that this is where medical science really steps in to take command and control, because while we don't know everything about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, every layer of the onion we peel back gives us an additional piton on a rock wall to understanding this disease.

In modern medicine, that's what we really try to do. Before we can develop effective treatments, we really need to understand the pathophysiology.

As a vascular biologist, I teamed up with my colleagues who study pathology and angiogenesis, the microcirculation, to ask what is actually happening in the lungs of these people who are infected with COVID-19. We felt that to get at the answer, we'd start at the end to understand that beginning.

We were able to obtain autopsy tissue from people who died of COVID-19 and compare their lungs with those from people who had died almost 20 years ago from the SARS-CoV-1 pandemic.

We also looked at H1N1 and at normal lungs donated by people who were providing tissue for lung transplants. We started to do a deep dive to look at what was actually happening. What we found and reported in the New England Journal Medicine was really interesting because this respiratory virus, which we breathe in, does get down to our pulmonary tree. It does cause respiratory infections, so we saw intense inflammation and the acute respiratory distress syndrome pathologic signs.

We also found something surprising, which is that this respiratory virus makes a beeline for the vascular, or endothelial, cells, where gas exchange takes place. As the vascular cells and endothelium are infected, it damages them.

We actually saw the damaged cell membranes using transmission electron microscopy. This was directly associated with the microthrombi, which we've now recognized to be a hallmark of COVID-19not in every patient, but in many patients that winds up becoming a significant problem.

As we dove deeper, we realized that this respiratory virus actually causes a vascular disease as well as a pulmonary disease. We then dove deeper to really ask what is happening at the gene-expression level. How do the blood vessels respond to it, which actually is a form of new blood vessel growth, a kind of an emergency response or panic response to microthrombi.

We speculated that if this is happening in the lung, could it be happening in other organs of the body as well?yielding some explanation for some of these other vexing clinical signs that we've seen in COVID-19.

Wilner: That was a great explanation. First of all, I read the paper just before we started this interview, and it is a fantastic paper. It is clear. I love the images. It brought back memories of when I was on my pathology rotation in medical school, and I could actually understand it! I read all these papers and they have an image and there's different blue and red and greenI never know what they are, but these images were very clear.

I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the neurologic complications [of COVID-19]. A big question has been, is this virus neurotrophic? In fact, there's an article that I wrote a couple of weeks ago that's on Medscape that reviews all of this.

My conclusion was that it doesn't seem to be, but one of the thorny points was, how come so many patients are having strokes? At first we said it's because they're old, sick, they're in the ICU, and they're going to have strokes. But then there have been reports of young, otherwise healthy patients having strokes.

It looks like you may have the explanation: that there is a hypercoagulable state because of damage to the blood vessels that causes not only lung but also vascular disease in the brain and causes strokes. What do you think?

Li: Well, our paper focused on the lung as a starting point, but I think it opens the door to future investigations, which we're actually in the middle of right now ourselves. We are looking at brain. Within a few weeks, we should have the first detailed comparison of whether or not the endothelium is similarly infected and injured in the people who actually died of stroke.

We actually are interested in comparing COVID-19 stroke with other forms of strokeischemic stroke, or classic strokesto look for those differences. Stay tuned for that.

I think that the other issue is that if this is a vascular disease that could be extrapolated from the lungs throughout the body, is this also happening within the myocardium? We are actually getting capillary endothelialitis within the heart muscle, within brain tissue, and maybe even within peripheral nerve as well.

An interesting finding is COVID toe, which has actually been the presenting sign in people who don't have a cough or fever, and they go to their podiatrist or vascular surgeon with this beefy red toe and a lot of pain. It turns out that later on they test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Are we looking at a systemic vasculitic type of syndrome that can affect everything from the toe to the brain? If we are, how do we understand, number one, how the virus transmits from the lung to those distal organs? Are they circulating and disseminating as an infection or are they actually finding another way to crawl cell to cell and Tarzan-ing their way into our organs?

Once they get to those organs, how do they cause damage? Why don't they cause damage in every patient? How much is actually due to coagulopathy versus other potential effects? Don't forget, the coagulopathy is on the inward-facing side of endothelial cells to the blood. Endothelial cells have two sides, including the abluminal side, or the side that actually faces the tissue.

When I started to look at some of the neurologic manifestations of COVID-19, I noticed that there were some patients who presented with bilateral encephalitis. I started to wonder how that works, because that's not a classic ischemic stroke.

You would be a much better judge of this than I would, but as an internist, I started thinking, how many things go to both sides of the brain? And why would that actually happen? Are there telltale clinical symptoms or signs that might allow us to actually do early detection, early diagnosis of people who might be more vulnerable or might go on to develop more serious neurologic symptoms?

Wilner: Let's jump to the ICU, where we have patients with COVID. Should they be anticoagulated?

Li: A really important paper came out in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology just a couple of weeks before our paper, looking at patients who had been hospitalized and discharged or expired, and looking at their coagulation or anticoagulation status.

It was pretty clear from that studyDr Valentin Fuster, a colleague of mine, was one of the coauthors of that paperthat those patients who were anticoagulated actually had a better outcome or higher rate of discharge from the hospital. Now, that's not necessarily a cause and effect, but it's a pretty compelling association if you take a look at the fact that these microthromboses could be happening not only in the lung but everywhere in the body.

I think an even bigger question would be, if you test positive and you're not hospitalized, should you be discharged from the emergency room home with anticoagulation? Would that be something we should be doing? Should you be on low-molecular-weight heparin? Should you be on aspirin? How should you be monitored post discharge home?

Are there other ways that we should be doing follow-up on these patients other than the classic "You're not sick enough with an infectious disease to be hospitalized; lets send you home"? Maybe in some of the people who go home and then drop a few weeks later, there is a propagating coagulopathy that really could have been managed from the time of sending them home from the emergency room.

Wilner: Maybe after a positive COVID test, you need a D-dimer test or some other assessment of coagulation to see if you're high-risk in at least a moment in time.

Now, let's just turn this upside down a little bit. One of the things you've told us is that this virus causes the blood vessels to react and actually increases angiogenesis. Could that ever be a good thing?

Li: Right. Don't forget, this is an autopsy study. This is not a real-time study. Think of it as a crime scene investigation; we're collecting the clues and trying to put together the pieces of what's happening.

One of the things that we did see that was surprising is that the blood vessels that had thrombi actually underwent a reactive form of angiogenesis, new blood vessel growth. That type of reactive angiogenesis was different from the regular sprouting that you would see in the heart, in wounds that are healing, and granulation tissue. Even following a typical ischemic stroke, you wind up getting some sprouting angiogenesis around these focal points of ischemia.

Here, what we saw is a different form of angiogenesis called intussusception. Now, this is not the pediatric intussusception where you think about the intestines. This is a form where a single blood vessel divides into two blood vessels by actually dropping drywall in and splitting into two.

Think about what this means. Why is it a reactive form? When you actually have all these microthrombi occurring everywhere, you don't have time for the 2 or 3 days it takes to sprout. You need immediate splitting in an effort to deliver better blood flow.

Now think about yourself as a car driving in a one-lane tunnel. Your car is an erythrocyte, and you're driving in a one-lane tunnel and the blood vessel is trying to react, and it drops drywall in from the ceiling to the floor. Where is the car going to go? You suddenly have turbulent blood flow in this emergency reactive form of angiogenesis, which probably contributes to the thrombotic setting in the context of endothelial damage.

The third strike for coagulopathy is really this intense inflammatory response. We saw tons of T cells wrapped around these thrombotic, reactive, angiogenic small blood vessels, and that makes total sense. The T cells are trying to clear the virus from the endothelial cells, but our normal circulation is in the way.

These were three smoking guns that we saw that might help us understand the microthrombosis, leading us to ask what is happening in other organs. That's really where we are todaytaking this crime scene investigation into the heart, into the brain, into the toes, into the kidneys, and into other organ systems so we can really try to put together a more systemic view of the role of endothelialitis and angiogenesis in COVID-19.

Wilner: Dr Li, this has been a fantastic illumination of what is happening inside the human body with COVID-19. I think it's also a message to all of those who think it's okay to give up social distancing. I think it's a reinforcement to say, hey, you don't want to get COVID-19 now. Why don't you keep social distancing, wear that mask, keep 6 feet away, and don't get the disease.

In 6 months or a year, we may understand this disease well enough that we will have a therapy. You don't want to be sick in the ICU orworsenext weekend when we're both on call, right? I think this is really great.

Li: One concluding point that I will tell you that this raises a specter upon is that after the virus is cleared from the body, after one has recovered from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we don't know yet what the long-term damage is that may occur and may persist in the vascular endothelium. If it turns out that there was widespread systemic damage to endothelial cells, then that could persist much longer than the actual infectious component of the virus.

I think that one of the red flags that got sent up as we looked at this is to ask the question in long-term survivors of COVID-19, of which there will be many because this virus doesn't kill most people. It kills some, but many people actually recover. What might be the long-term manifestations of this novel coronavirus? I think time will tell, but this is where medical research is just beginning to chip away at the enigma of COVID-19.

Wilner: Where can people find more information about the Angiogenesis Foundation?

Li: You can find out about the Angiogenesis Foundation on our website at http://www.angio.org or you can find me pretty easily on the Internet at drwilliamli.com.

I've also written a book called Eat to Beat Disease. There's quite a lot of interest in this because I'm also interested in the impact of healthy lifestyles and diet on endothelial health.

Wilner: That's great. Thank you very much for joining us on Medscape, Dr Li. I look forward to your next set of discoveries.

Li: Thank you, Dr Wilner.

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Understanding the Puzzling Pathology of COVID-19 - Medscape

Editors note Were continuing our tradition of taking a look back each Saturday at some of the important, interesting or even odd events as they were reported during the same week throughout the years, along with interesting advertising features from back in the day.

This week in 1886, the Hillsboro News Herald, in news from Lynchburg, reported several citizens visited the Queen City, the school board met to take action on a proposal to form a new district in the township and a gang of workmen went down to the swamps on the Hannah land to do battle with a regiment of rattle snakes.

H.W. Wolfe & Co. promised $10 in gold to the farmers wife who sold them the most pounds in turkeys, and $5 in gold to the largest turkey of their own raising.

It was reported that the observance of Memorial Day in Hillsboro brought solemn ceremonies in the surrounding towns, with the Decoration Address being delivered by Albert Douglass, Jr. of Chillicothe. The paper pointed out it was proper to pay homage to those who fought so nobly in the War of the Rebellion some 20 years ago.

A.W. Keys had a six-room house for rent at Hoaglands Crossing, and Asa Haynes had pure German carp for sale at his Spring Lake Farm for $8 per hundred.

This week in 1935, the Hillsboro News Herald reported that in terms of new car and truck sales in the county, 62 passenger cars and three trucks had been sold to this point in the year, and that Chevrolet led the way over Plymouth and Ford.

At Bells Theatre, women whispered her namemen laughed but remembered in The Story of Temple Drake, starring Miriam Hopkins and Jack Larue. Then next Saturday, it was another tale of the old West as Tim McCoy and Joyce Compton starred in Fighting for Justice.

Meanwhile, at the Forum Theatre, it was billed as the most exciting picture he ever made, as George O Brien and Maureen OSullivan starred in Zane Greys Robbers Roost.

At Lisciandro Bros. on North High Street in Hillsboro, specials for the weekend included Mother Hubbard genuine egg noodles, with 8-ounce cellophane bags selling two for 19 cents, the five-pound sack of Gold Medal flour was 23 cents and two pounds of robust, full-body Santo coffee was freshly ground daily and 33 cents.

A minor earthquake caused plaster to fall from walls and windows to crack in Brown and Adams County homes. Residents in Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky described it as a low rumble, with a child from Ripley being thrown from his swing but uninjured.

In news from Pricetown, 126 attended Bible school on Sunday with an offering of $2.89, Homer Purdy and family from Akron were visiting relatives and Elvin Jones and family visited relatives in Kentucky.

A blue and gold tent theatre was going up in the parking lot of the Texaco filling station on West Main Street in Hillsboro for the arrival of Billroys Comedians for one big show on June 8, 1935. It was billed as positively, emphatically, the largest, prettiest, fastest stepping and best costumed chorus in America!

This week in 1974, The Greenfield Daily Times reported a jam-packed crowd at the Greenfield Recreation and Civic Center heard a grim tale of drug dealing and addiction from a narcotics agent.

It was a record crowd at the Fruitdale Sportsman grounds on Moxley Road for a motocross sporting event. A crowd estimated at between 1,000 to 1,500 watched 261 riders vie for cash and prizes.

At Big Lu & Dairy Queen in Greenfield, the mid-week special was the Big Lu sausage sandwich for 39 cents. For a big mans appetite, the two-pattie deluxe was 69 cents.

An advertisement for Hop in the Woods Furniture invited customers to stop in for a chance to win a new 1974 Cadillac to be given away during its 50th anniversary sale in August.

The Greenfield office of the Hillsboro Bank & Savings Co. asked if your money was earning as much as it should in its ad. A $1,000 deposit in a three-year certificate of deposit would earn a 6.66 percent annual yield, while the same amount in a 90-day CD would yield 5.56 percent.

Clint Eastwood was back in the role of Det. Harry Callahan in Magnum Force, and then it was Steve McQueen teaming up with Ali MacGraw in The Getaway, both showing at The Ranch Drive-In Theatre.

Highlander Ford was offering to pay for customers gas to get them to take a scenic drive to Bainbridge and test drive its large selection of Ford cars and trucks.

This week in 2002, The Times Gazette reported that eight Highland County seniors were each named recipients of the Ernie Blankenship scholarships. Todd Ford, Scott Morgan, Missy Marsh and Lauren Schad from Hillsboro, Emily Gossett from Greenfield, Brittany Allen from Lynchburg-Clay, Rachel Bellamy from Whiteoak and Lynette Kiesling from Fairfield each received $1,000.

Appearing on the front page was FFA member Tessa Eply demonstrating to a kindergarten student the proper way to milk a cow.

The obituary for the woman in whose honor the Bainbridge Fall Festival of Leaves scholarship pageant is held appeared in the paper. Loraine Granger, who was a retired and beloved school teacher in the Paint Valley School district, passed away at the age of 81 on May 30, 2002.

The Greenfield Police Department hosted Student Police Academy 02 for students in the Greenfield Middle School, allowing them over the course of six weeks to experience different aspects of crime scene investigation.

Volunteers who donated their time to instill in students a love for reading were recognized in the end of school year edition of The Lions Corner. Ruth Hussy, Donica Collier, Deanne Link, Colleen Lewis, Rebecca Heckathorn, Carole Davidson, Nancy Holliday and Carol Gustin were all acknowledged for their work.

In sports, Whiteoaks Chris Arant qualified for the state track meet by placing second in the regional long jump.

Reach Tim Colliver at 937-402-2571.

A look back at news and advertising items through the years

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Earthquakes and rattlesnakes and drugs in 1974 - Hillsboro Times Gazette

They might resemble doll's houses, but with their blood-splattered walls, charred furniture and figurines in various states of decomposition, these miniatures are far from child's play.

Created by Frances Glessner Lee, an American socialite born in 1878, the tiny murder-scene dioramas revolutionised the study of crimes and helped give rise to the CSI-style investigation we know today.

"Everything that we have come to know and expect in that kind of crime scene investigation can ultimately be traced directly to Lee and her work," forensic investigator Bruce Goldfarb, who has researched Lee's life, tells ABC RN's Life Matters.

"Were it not for her, forensic medicine would not have emerged in the United States as it did."

Lee was born in Chicago into a rich family, and raised as a "young woman of influence".

She wasn't expected to go on to further study or to have a career. But a home education offered her knowledge of the domestic arts, sciences and literature, and she became a voracious reader.

From an early age, she developed a knack for miniatures, creating in her youth a mini-orchestra, with 90 musicians dressed in formal clothing. Their instruments were so lifelike, some could even be played.

It was an early sign of Lee's obsession with detail.

Life Matters is here to help you get a handle on all the important stuff: love, sex, health, fitness, parenting, career, finances and family.

Later in life, at the age of 52, Lee was introduced to the world of forensic medicine via a medical examiner friend, George Burgess McGrath.

McGrath shared stories of high-profile unresolved criminal cases, and it piqued her interest.

Lee discussed McGrath's cases with him while he explained the impact of poisons on the body and patterns of injury. She observed post-mortems in an autopsy room, and began reading more and more on criminology and forensic science.

It wasn't long before Lee began putting her artistic skills to new use. She created her first miniature crime scene in the late 1930s, based on a case McGrath had investigated.

That led her to create a series of dioramas, compact enough to fit on a table-top, each depicting the scene of a real unsolved murder.

Lee's detail is incredible: heads are finished with wigs; torsos and limbs are filled with sawdust, cotton and sand; a body in rigor mortis is stiffened with wire; porcelain skin is carefully painted.

There are tiny tin labels, lifelike ropes and curtain tassels, books with printed pages, and interiors of unrelated apartments that can be spied through windows.

Each diorama, including the furniture, the clothing and the figures, was custom made, mostly by hand, and took around five years and a huge amount of money to create.

"Each one of these dioramas cost about what it costs to build an actual house," says Mr Goldfarb, whose book detailing Lee's life and work is called 18 Tiny Deaths: the Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics.

"She did go into extreme detail, to depict rigor mortis and decomposition and those sorts of things, and fill these dioramas with detail just like a real scene."

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Up until the 1930s and 40s, police in the US were ill-equipped for scientific homicide investigations, Mr Goldfarb says.

"The problem was that until the middle of the 20th century, there was no training for police officers' in-depth investigation and forensic investigation. So police did things for lack of knowing better," he says.

"They might pick up a weapon or put the finger through a bullet hole ... [or] walk through blood, fold back bloody sheets."

Lee's 3D crime scene recreations became a new and effective way for police officers to practise the observation of crime scenes.

In 1945, Lee established a training seminar at Harvard University to train police officers.

There they could learn about such things as "blunt force injuries and sharp force injuries and drownings and poisonings", Mr Goldfarb says.

"The most critical component of an investigation, arguably, is the scene itself, because everything begins right there," he says.

"Police are the first responders [so] it's very important for them to recognise clues, to see things that may be significant evidence, so that it may be preserved and then processed and interpreted correctly.

"But the most important thing is to not compromise anything. And that's what the [dioramas] were for.

"What better way to observe a scene, then not be able to walk into it. You're forced to look at it. And that's the purpose that they serve."

Rather than offer clues towards one clear answer, the scenes in Lee's crime scene recreations point to a range of possibilities.

"Each one of them has all sorts of red herrings. They are all purposefully ambiguous," Mr Goldfarb says.

Entire bodies are rarely visible. Faces are obscured. There's no autopsy report.

"You're left with only partial clues ... so any sort of hypothesis is just conjecture. That's part of the purpose of them, to just make you think," Mr Goldfarb says.

Incredibly, the week-long training seminar Lee introduced at Harvard Medical School in the 1940s continues today.

Now called the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar on Homicide Investigation, it's at a forensic medical centre in Baltimore.

And more than 70 years on, her dioramas collectively known as the Nutshell Studies are continuing to help people learn to solve crimes.

"They're still valuable as teaching tools because there's still no substitute for observing a three-dimensional object," Mr Goldfarb says.

"There's no other medium that comes close. There's no virtual reality or anything that comes near to matching what you can observe through a diorama."

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Murder in the doll's house: Frances Glessner Lee and the making of modern forensics - ABC News

WEST ALEXANDRIA Police Chief Tony Gasper presented a 30-year veteran with the West Alexandria Police Departments Employee of the Year Award at the villages regular monthly meeting April 20.

Officer Mike McDonald, whos been with the West Alexandria police for about a year and a half, was also promoted to Assistant Police Chief during last months meeting. McDonald, who currently lives in Middletown, has worked in law enforcement for three decades, including 20 years with the Dayton Police Department and ten working in crime scene investigation.

He knows everything about everything, Gasper said before presenting McDonald with the award. If it comes around, he knows about it.

Gasper stressed that it was the little things a bigger police department might overlook which make McDonald such an important member of the team. He pointed to a recent case in which McDonald spent three hours tracking down the landlord of a senior citizen whose furnace was on the fritz.

Its little things like that that make everyone in our community happy with the police department, Gasper said. A lot of times, especially new officers, they want to go out and get the bad guys. But sometimes it doesnt work out that way. That lady was a senior citizen. She had no heat. And he wasnt going to let it go until he did something about it.

It was the chance to be of service, according to McDonald, that drew him to police work in Preble County.

I liked the fact that it was a small community where I could focus more on the service aspect of police work and less on the enforcement, McDonald said. After 30 years, the last thing I wanted to do was run around chasing drug dealers and gang bangers. Most of our work here is service-oriented. It gives you a chance to interact with people in a way thats positive and psychologically healthy, which is not the way it is in a big city.

McDonald elaborated, saying that working in West Alexandria gave him the opportunity to help improve residents quality of life.

You can address issues here without the level of animosity youd get in the city. And you can actually see the fruits of your labor by being able to help people out, McDonald said. In Dayton, 90 percent of issues end with someone going to jail, and that doesnt change anything. It doesnt fix the underlying problems.

McDonald praised the residents of West Alexandria for having a good relationship with their police.

One of the first things I noticed is that people are friendly and supportive of the police department. People are very nice, and I wasnt used to that, McDonald said. I want to express my appreciation to the people of West Alexandria for allowing me to have this opportunity, and to say that Im honored to have the chance to be here and to help out in whatever way I can.

West Alexandria Police Chief Tony Gasper presented McDonald with the award, and announced his promotion, during the villages regular monthly meeting April 20.

30-yr vet promoted to Assistant Chief

Reach Anthony Baker at 937-683-4057 or on Facebook @improperenglish

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Mike McDonald named Employee of the Year by West Alex police department - Register-Herald

Worried about the spate of sexual crimes against women in the country, and buoyed by a passion for socially relevant solutions that bring an impactful change in the world we live in, two young graduates decided to start ADIRO Labs to transform DNA evidence and sample collection in the country.

Mumbai-based Saaniya Mehra and Zane Barboza the founders of ADIRO Labs were both pursuing their undergraduate studies, the former at MIT Institute of Technology, Pune and the latter studying BSc at Himalayan University, when they began working on a product to address the needs of evidence collection from victims of sexual assault.

During the initial phase of our prototyping and design concept generation, we met the former Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi who assisted us with a letter of encouragement and support. Post the finalisation of our prototype, we felt that this product was important and relevant enough to bring into the real world, Saaniya tells HerStory.

Their initial research showed that were was a lack of standardised methods to deal with the various kinds of evidence and sample collection in the country, which led to a drastic drop in the number of viable DNA and evidence samples presented in the courts.

ADIRO Labs was founded with a mission to research and design relevant solutions in the public health and law enforcement sectors. Through the startup, the duo initiated Project AASHA. Launched earlier this year, it is a social cause that focuses on citizen empowerment and women's safety.

The implementation of the AASHA DNA Kits, according to the founders, will promote a government-approved, systematic, uniform procedure that employs the use of high-quality DNA collection equipment to assess a victim of sexual assault from head-to-toe, collecting any evidence that may be submitted for forensic analysis.

The founders with a client

To modernise Indian law enforcement and forensic investigation, the startup broadly focuses on evidence detection, collection, storage, and transport in various categories of crime scene investigation, narcotics detection kits, explosive detection kits, and much more.

Our primary aim is to equip our Indian investigating officials with equipment and tools of the highest standard to increase the efficiency of investigations in the field, Saaniya elaborates. They aim to make the kits available at all medical and law enforcement agencies across the country, even those operating in remote areas.

The products are manufactured at their office space in Mumbai and can also be customised. The target audience lies within the B2G space, specifically in the public health sector and in law enforcement. Saaniya believes that the indirect beneficiary is every citizen in the country. They hope to sell the kits to state governments that are modernising investigations in the field.

The founders find it challenging to raise grants for Project AASHA in the public healthcare sector.

With the advent of the DNA bill in July 2019, the importance of DNA-related technologies in India has come to the forefront and we hope that in the coming years, our solution will be adopted on a pan-India level to standardise the approach of medical examiners in the case of evidence collection from victims of sexual assault, says Saaniya.

However, they are happy that the content list and guidelines they worked on with various experts in the government forensic community were published as standard guidelines by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2018.

AASHA kits have been onboard by many organisations like the Bureau of Police Research and Development HQ, New Delhi; Police Department Andaman and Nicobar; State Forensic Science Laboratory, Uttar Pradesh Police; Home Department, Uttar Pradesh State Government; Chief Medical & Health Officer, Bhopal; Public Health and Family Welfare Department, Madhya Pradesh, and other major hospitals. The company is presently in the process of kick-starting a pilot project in Maharashtra under the State Health and Family Welfare Department. The project is currently stalled due to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown.

Though bootstrapped, ADIRO Labs is part of the community slate programme at WE Hub, a social enterprise accelerator for women from the Government of Telangana.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, ADIRO Labs has adapted to the changing scenario by facilitating essential supplies to local government institutions in Maharashtra, and MCGM the nodal point for the distribution of PPEs to all state government hospitals. Currently, their activities are focused in Maharashtra, though they are not limited to supplying PPEs to other states, if approached.

The founders future plans consist of ensuring that AASHA kits are adapted in every state pan-India, and to promote the standardisation and modernisation of evidence collection procedures.

Through this, we aim to increase the influx of viable evidence into the criminal justice system and further enable speedy prosecution and justice for every citizen in our country, says Saaniya.

How has the coronavirus outbreak disrupted your life? And how are you dealing with it? Write to us or send us a video with subject line 'Coronavirus Disruption' to editorial@yourstory.com

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How these entrepreneurs are offering a ray of hope to victims of sexual assault - YourStory