IIT alumnus develops cigarette filter to cut nicotine intake

New Delhi: When IIT alumnus Prateek Sharma watched a no-smoking advisory starring actor Akshay Kumar in a cinema in 2018, an idea struck him that not only matched his line of research but could have a huge social impact as well.

Nearly five years later, and after a lot of hard work and dogged perseverance, Sharma is set to launch Cigibud -- the world's first smoking cessation filter. Cigibud, which will be officially launched later on Wednesday, filters up to 80 per cent of tar and nicotine from a cigarette without affecting its taste and smoking experience, and will help a smoker quit in three months, Sharma claimed.

When the idea of a smoking cessation filter came, Sharma was already on a mission to develop advanced air filtration solutions to curb the detrimental impact of pollution on human health. At the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, he had developed Nanofiber technology with the help of his professors and got it patented. When he graduated in 2015, he undertook efforts to make the technology commercially viable by launching products based on it.

His out-of-the-box efforts earned him the Startup National Award 2017 conferred by the President of India. "We were already working on some products such as Nasofilters, Nanoclean Pollution Net and Nasomask.

However, the advisory inspired us to broaden our scope of work and we decided to use the same technology to develop something that can help people quit smoking," Sharma said. Sharma's team carried out a study which suggested that 63 per cent of smokers want to quit smoking but are unable to do so because of nicotine addiction. They also came to know that even according to the WHO, only four per cent of smokers succeed in quitting without any cessation support.