New Delhi: A low-cost COVID-19 test kit developed by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi which uses an alternative testing method has been e-launched by Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ on Wednesday.
IIT Delhi, which became the first academic institution to develop a COVID-19 testing method, gave non-exclusive open licence to companies for commercialising the test, but with a price rider.
IIT Delhi launches low-cost COVID-19 test kit While the institute had kept a price rider of Rs 500 per kit, the company Newtech Medical Devices, which has launched the kit named 'Corosure', has not announced the price yet.
Minister of State for HRD Sanjay Dhotre and Higher Education Secretary Amit Khare were also present on the occasion.
Speaking on the occasion, Pokhriyal said that the country requires cheap and reliable testing kits for coronavirus to control the pandemic and Corosure is the indigenous product of the nation.
The Minister appreciated Prof. Vivekanandan Perumal and his research team of IIT Delhi including Prashant Pradhan (PhD Scholar), Ashutosh Pandey (PhD Scholar), Praveen Tripathi (PhD Scholar), Dr Akhilesh Mishra, Dr Parul Gupta, Dr Sonam Dhamija, Prof. Manoj B. Menon, Prof. Bishwajit Kundu and Prof. James Gomes.
"This will change the paradigm of COVID-19 testing in the country, both in terms of scale and cost. The product, approved by ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) and DCGI (Drug Controller General of India), has been launched. The company 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 the lab to market," said IIT Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao.
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According to the team at IIT Delhi, the current testing methods available are "probe-based", while the one developed by them is a "probe-free" method, which reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy.
IIT Delhi launches low-cost COVID-19 test kit Using comparative sequence analyses, the IIT Delhi team identified unique regions (short stretches of RNA sequences) in the 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," Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, lead member of the team, had told reporters.
"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.
IIT Delhi has given license to 10 companies to manufacture COVID-19 diagnostic kit using the technology developed by its researchers.
Addressing the occasion, Founder of Newtech Medical Devices Jatin Goyal said, "Using the unique technology developed by IIT Delhi and our expertise in reagent and kit-making, we have ensured an accurate, affordable, Make-in-India kit for the diagnosis of Sars-CoV2, which is a "probe-free" method and reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy. We are anticipating two million kits by next month.”
With over 30,000 fresh cases recorded in a day, India's COVID-19 tally sprinted past nine lakh on Wednesday, just four days after it crossed the eight-lakh mark, according to the Union health ministry data.
The total coronavirus caseload in the country surged to 9,36,181 and the death toll mounted to 24,309 with 5,92,032 recoveries.
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