Success against Corona / IIT Delhi becomes first institute to make testing kit, 25% cheaper than existing kit.
The kit is prepared by the team of IIT Delhi Kusuma School of Biological Sciences.
ICMR has also approved IIT’s PCR based testing kit, the transition will be known.
India will no longer have to depend on China or other countries for the Covid-19 test. IIT Delhi has become the first educational institution in the country to manufacture Cora testing kits. ICMR has also approved IIT’s PCR based testing kit. However, it is not yet known how much the kit will produce.
This kit may be a quarter cheaper than the one in the market. This will also inform the transition. The kit was developed by a team from the institute’s Kusuma School of Biological Sciences.
Team members worked 18-18 hours
Team members Prof. Viswajit Kundu and Prof. Vivekananda Perumal said the team had started work on this since the first case of transition in the country would have come to Kerala. From March 22 to April 9, team members worked 18-18 hours. Due to the lockdown, it was difficult to send the kit to Pune for tests. This time the protocol has been recognized.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology here have prepared a way to detect COVID-19 disease which may significantly reduce the test cost 25% cheaper than existing kit, making it affordable for large sections.
The National Institute of Virology, Pune, is within the process and methodology of validating this test on clinical samples.
The central government on Saturday recommended that the utmost charge for a COVID-19 test by private laboratories shouldn’t exceed ₹4,600.
All private laboratories which have NABL (National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories) accreditation for real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) assay for RNA virus are going to be allowed to conduct COVID-19 tests, consistent with the rules issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for COVID-19 testing privately laboratories, which were notified by the Health Ministry on Saturday night.
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However, the team at IIT claimed that their test are often performed at a way cheaper cost. “Using comparative sequence analysis, we’ve identified unique regions in COVID-19. These unique regions aren’t present in other human coronaviruses providing a chance to specifically detect COVID-19,” said Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, lead member of the team. “Once the NIV validates the assay, it are often quickly scaled up to satisfy the increasing need in our country,” he added.
‘Accurate results’
According to Professor Manoj Menon, the present testing methods available are “probe-based”, while the one developed by his team is “probe-free”, which reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy. “Primer sets targeting unique regions within the spike protein of COVID-19 were designed and tested using real time polymerase chain reaction.. The sensitivity of this in-house assay is like that of commercially available kits,” said Parul Gupta and Prashant Pradhan, members of the team.
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“This assay are often used as a qualitative (yes or no) assay without the necessity for extensive instrumentation. additionally , it also can quantitatively assess virus loads. We propose the utilization of this assay for specific and affordable high throughput screening of COVID 19,” they added.
