IIT Delhi developed a low-cost covid-19 test kit. Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh pokhriyal Nishank and Minister of State Sanjay Dhire, launched the kit on Wednesday.
Jatin Goyal the Managing Director of COROSURE, said the total cost of the kit is around Rs.500, making at the world’s most affordable covid-19 testing kit.
The kit is approved by ICMR and Drug Controller General of India also COROSURE is one of the companies that has been granted the non-exclusive licence for the probe free RT PCR based covid-19 test kit.
“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.
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, told PTI.
Vivekanandan Perumal, assistant professor at the Kusuma School of Biological Sciences said “Most of the test kits that are currently available in the market are using a probe, which is the most expensive element. We are not using that for the test. It is successful at the laboratory level, but now we have sent it for clinical trials to NIV Pune, and are awaiting the results from them”.