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Terumo India Signs MoU With AIG Hospitals to Strengthen Interventional Radiology Training — Building the Workforce That India's Cath Labs Need

"India's interventional radiology and cardiology infrastructure is expanding rapidly. But the bottleneck is not equipment — it is the trained workforce needed to operate it. Training partnerships like this one are how India builds that workforce at scale."

By Mustafa Shariff, Editor in Chief · April 24 , 2026 · 5 min read

Summary

• Terumo India + AIG Hospitals: The Interventional Radiology Training MoU That Addresses India's Specialist Workforce Gap
• Terumo India and AIG Hospitals have signed an MoU for interventional radiology training. Here is why this matters for India's growing interventional cardiology and radiology infrastructure.

Japan's Terumo Corporation — one of the world's largest manufacturers of interventional cardiology and radiology equipment, catheters, guidewires, stents, and vascular access devices — and AIG Hospitals in Hyderabad have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen interventional radiology training in India. The agreement establishes a structured collaboration between one of India's premier tertiary care institutions and a global medical device leader to build clinical training capacity in the interventional specialties that are among the fastest-growing components of India's healthcare system.

AIG Hospitals — the Asian Institute of Gastroenterology — is one of India's most prestigious tertiary care institutions, recognised as Asia's largest dedicated gastroenterology and hepatology centre. Founded by renowned gastroenterologist Dr Nageshwar Reddy, AIG has also developed significant capabilities in hepatology, liver transplantation, and increasingly in complex interventional procedures that require the kind of guidewire, catheter, and device expertise that Terumo manufactures. The MoU establishes AIG as a Terumo training centre for interventional radiology — combining AIG's clinical case volume and faculty expertise with Terumo's product knowledge, training resources, and global best-practice protocols.

The Workforce Gap Behind the Partnership

India's interventional radiology and cardiology infrastructure has been growing rapidly. The combination of PE-backed hospital expansion (KKR-BMH-Star, Manipal, Max, Apollo), the ₹11,500 crore bed addition planned by private hospitals in FY26, and government hospital infrastructure investment has been adding catheterisation laboratories, hybrid operating theatres, and interventional radiology suites at a pace that significantly exceeds historical norms.

The bottleneck is not equipment or infrastructure — it is trained personnel. An interventional radiology suite that is staffed with undertrained operators generates poor clinical outcomes and high complication rates. A cath lab that lacks experienced catheterisation technicians cannot run at clinical capacity. Building the workforce that India's expanding interventional infrastructure requires is a specific training challenge that existing medical education pathways — DM Cardiology, MD Radiology — cannot address at the scale and speed needed.

Clinical training partnerships between medical device companies and high-volume tertiary care hospitals are the industry's standard solution to this gap. Device manufacturers have deep knowledge of how their catheters, guidewires, and stents are designed to be used, what the failure modes are, and what procedural techniques optimise outcomes. High-volume clinical centres have the case volumes and faculty to provide hands-on supervised training in realistic procedural environments. The Terumo-AIG MoU creates the structured environment in which both assets are combined.

India's Interventional Cardiology Growth

India performs approximately 400,000-500,000 percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) annually — roughly one-fifth of what the country's cardiovascular disease burden would justify. The same under-penetration exists across peripheral vascular interventions, transcatheter valve procedures, and structural heart interventions. As insurance coverage expands (Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY coverage of PCIs has been a significant driver of volume growth in government-empanelled hospitals), the demand for interventional procedures will grow faster than the training pipeline currently supports.

Terumo's global interventional product portfolio — spanning coronary, peripheral, neuro, and oncology intervention — covers the full range of catheter-based procedures that the training programme will address. The choice of AIG Hospitals as the training partner reflects the specific value of a high-volume, academically rigorous institution with established faculty in the gastroenterology-related interventional subspecialties (ERCP, endovascular procedures, biliary interventions) where AIG has particularly strong clinical depth.

BHC Perspective

At Bengaluru Health Community, the Terumo-AIG MoU is a story about the workforce infrastructure that enables India's healthcare infrastructure expansion to actually deliver better patient outcomes. Building hospitals and buying equipment are necessary conditions for better healthcare. Training the clinicians and technicians who operate that equipment is the sufficient condition. For BHC founders building in medical device distribution, clinical training platforms, or healthcare workforce development — the Terumo-AIG model is the commercial and clinical template that the expanding Indian interventional care market needs replicated across dozens of specialties and hundreds of hospitals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the Terumo India-AIG Hospitals MoU?
A: A partnership between Japan's Terumo Corporation and Hyderabad's AIG Hospitals to establish AIG as a structured training centre for interventional radiology, combining AIG's clinical case volume and faculty with Terumo's product knowledge and training resources.

Q: Why is interventional radiology training important for India?
A: India is rapidly adding cath labs and interventional radiology suites through PE-backed hospital expansion, but the trained workforce to staff them — interventional cardiologists, radiologists, catheterisation technicians — is in short supply. Training partnerships close the gap between infrastructure build and clinical capacity.

Q: What is AIG Hospitals known for?
A: AIG Hospitals in Hyderabad is recognised as Asia's largest dedicated gastroenterology and hepatology centre, founded by renowned gastroenterologist Dr Nageshwar Reddy, with strong capabilities in liver transplantation and complex interventional procedures.