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A low-cost COVID-19 test kit developed by Indian Institute of Technology Delhi that makes use of an alternate testing technique will be launched on Wednesday, in accordance to the IIT director right here.
IIT Delhi, which turned the primary educational institute to develop a COVID-19 testing technique, gave non-exclusive open licence to corporations for commercialising the test, however with a value rider. While the institute had saved a value rider of Rs 500 per kit, the corporate Newtech Medical Devices, which is launching the kit named ‘corosure’ on Wednesday, has not introduced the value but.
Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank and Minister of State for HRD Sanjay Dhotre will launch the kit.
“This should 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), is being launched tomorrow. “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 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”, while the one developed by them is a “probe-free” method, which reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy.
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 PTI.
“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 previous 9 lakh on Tuesday, simply three days after it crossed the eight-lakh mark, in accordance to the Union well being ministry knowledge.
The complete coronavirus caseload within the nation surged to 9,06,752 and the loss of life toll mounted to 23,727 with 553 folks succumbing to the illness in 24 hours, the information up to date at eight am on Tuesday confirmed.
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