Assam lab isolates COVID-19 virus; becomes 4th facility in India

GUWAHATI: Himanta Biswa Sarma, Health Minister, Government of Assam, announced that the Regional Medical Research Centre, NE region (RMRC) in Lahowal, Dibrugarh, became the fourth laboratory in the country to successfully isolate SARS-CoV-2 virus that can be used for the production of a vaccine against COVID-19 on July 1.

The RMRC became the third government laboratory after National Institute of Virology, Pune and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad to isolate the virus. The other facility to do so is Bharat Biotech, a private biotechnology laboratory in Hyderabad.

Sarma said that the scientists at the RMRC have isolated the COVID-19 virus in VERO-CCL81 cell line in the BSL-3 level lab available at the institute and this development can help in the production of live and viable SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory in abundance when required. He also said at RMRC, Dibrugarh all strains of SARS-CoV-2 were L-type and not S-type, which is slowly disappearing across the world. The scientists have have classified the virus into different clades (O, A1, A2a, A3, B, B1, etc) which differ from one another very minutely and the A2a clade is now the most dominant across the world, including India.

The ICMR-RMRC, situated at Lahowal in Dibrugarh, has been supporting the state of Assam and other NE states in the fight against COVID-19. Till date it has provided almost 50,000 diagnostic test reports of COVID-19 for the people of this region.