The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi has developed a method to detect COVID-19, which will reportedly help reduce testings costs and usher in affordability for large swathes of the population. This has received approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Need for testing
In the country, scaling up testing is the need of the hour. On Thursday, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had said that till date India has tested more than 5 lakh people for COVID-19. "We are going to increase the numbers of government labs to 300 and ramp up our present daily testing capacity of 55,000 to 1 lakh per day by May 31."
Ramping up testing exponentially has been a cornerstone of India's pandemic strategy. The Centre said that, over the month, there has been a 24-fold increase in testing; As on March 23, nearly 15,000 tests were done across the country, and, by April 22, more than 5 lakh tests were conducted, which is about "33 times in 30 days".
However, affordability was a problem, as was accuracy. India had recently advised states to stop using the rapid antibody test kits, which were imported from China, as it examined their quality in the wake of complaints that they are not fully effective. Last week, India procured 5 lakh rapid antibody test kits from two Chinese firms and they were distributed to several states reporting rising cases of coronavirus infections. Rajasthan government had complained that the kits were giving out inaccurate results.
At present, the government uses the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect coronavirus from throat or nasal swab samples of people. These take around five to six hours to show the results. In the rapid antibody tests, the blood samples of suspected patients are taken, and it normally takes around 15-30 minutes to give the result.
How do the IIT-Delhi test kits work?
In simplest terms, the test method is a "probe-free" method, as opposed to most current methods which are "probe-based". This will help reduce the testing cost without compromising on accuracy. What the test does is it identifies unique RNA sequences or phrases in the COVID-19-causing SARS COV-2 genome. RNA, an essential macromolecule, performs various important roles related to protein synthesis such as transcription, decoding, regulation and expression of genes.
"Using comparative sequence analysis, we have identified unique regions in COVID-19. 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.
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"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," he added.
The team at IIT claims that their test can be performed at a much cheaper cost and hence will be affordable for general public.
The research team includes PhD scholars Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Pandey and Praveen Tripathi, post-doctoral fellows Drs Parul Gupta and Akhilesh Mishra and professors Vivekanandan Perumal, Manoj B Menon, James Gomes and Bishwajit Kundu.
Large-scale deployment of the tests are being planned.