New Delhi: A low-cost COVID-19 test kit developed by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi will be launched Wednesday. The IIT Delhi kit will conduct the test in an alternative method said the director of the organisation here, Tuesday.
IIT Delhi became the first academic institute to develop a COVID-19 testing method. It gave non-exclusive open licence to companies for commercialising the test, but with a price rider.
IIT had kept a price rider of Rs 500 per kit. However, ‘Newtech Medical Devices’, which is launching the kit named ‘corosure’, has not announced the price yet. Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ and Minister of State for HRD Sanjay Dhotre will launch the kit.
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“This should change the paradigm of COVID-19 testing in India, both in terms of scale and cost. The product, approved by ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) and DCGI (Drug Controller General of India), is being launched tomorrow (Wednesday). ‘Newtech Medical Devices’, using IIT Delhi technology, can do two million tests per month at an extremely affordable cost. This is a true example of lab to market”” said IIT Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao.
According to the team at IIT Delhi, the current testing methods available are ‘probe-based’. The one developed by them is a ‘probe-free’ method, which reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy.
Using comparative sequence analyses, the team identified unique regions (short stretches of RNA sequences) in COVID-19 and SARS COV-2 genome.
“These unique regions are not present in other human coronaviruses providing an opportunity to specifically detect COVID-19,” said Professor Vivekanandan Perumal. He is the lead member of the team that made the kit.
“Primer sets, targeting unique regions in the spike protein of COVID-19, were designed and tested using real-time polymerase chain reaction. The primers designed by the group specifically bind to regions conserved in over 200 fully sequenced COVID-19 genomes. The sensitivity of this in-house assay is comparable to that of commercially available kits,” Perumal added.
With 28,498 fresh cases recorded in a day, India’s COVID-19 tally sprinted past nine lakh Tuesday.
