NEW DELHI: Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-D) has become the first academic institute in India to get approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for its real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay. The method will be used to test people for Covid-19 in India. The test reduces the cost of testing and makes it viable for agencies to test a large population for the disease. The approval comes at a time when the ICMR asked states not to use Chinese Covid-19 testing kits after Rajasthan and few other states complained of massive variation in test results.
According to officials, the currently used testing method is ‘probe-based’ while the one developed by IIT-D is ‘probe-free’. This is the reason for it being cost-effective while still giving accurate results. “The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100 per cent,” a senior official told PTI.
Since the assay does not require fluorescent, it can be easily scaled up to be used widely. The team responsible for developing the assay is already targeting large scale deployment with suitable industrial partners as soon as possible.
Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, the lead member of the team, said that the team has successfully managed to identify unique regions in Covid-19, using comparative sequence analysis. Since these unique regions are not present in other human coronaviruses, it becomes easy to specifically detect Covid-19.
“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 authorities are hoping that it will help fill the shortage of testing kits in the coming days.