Affordable Test Method Developed By IIT-Delhi Gets ICMR Nod

Affordable Test Method Developed By IIT-Delhi Gets ICMR Nod

A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi has developed a low-cost method of detecting COVID-19. The institute claimed the new testing method based on real-time polymerase chain reaction-based methods of diagnosis has been approved by the Indian Council for Medical Research.

This has come at a time when theIndian Council of Medical Research has halted testing for the coronavirus usingthe Chinese rapid testing kits because of massive variations in test results,compounding the challenge to contain the pandemic.

The current testing methods for COVID-19 are "probe-based" while the one developed by the institute is a "probe-free" method, which reduces the cost of testing without compromising its accuracy, IIT-Delhi said.

"The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100%," an unidentified official of IIT-Delhi told. "This makes IIT (Delhi) the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay."

The probe-free assay for COVID-19will be useful for specific affordable high throughput testing, as it can beeasily scaled up because it does not require fluorescent probes, the officialadded. The institute is now targeting large-scale deployment of the kit ataffordable prices with suitable industrial partners "as soon as possible".

The researchers at IIT-Delhi usedcomparative sequence analyses to identify unique regions, or short stretches ofRibonucleic Acid in the COVID-19 and SARS COV-2 genome, Professor VivekanandanPerumal, the lead member of the team, told. "These unique regions are notpresent in other human coronaviruses providing an opportunity to specificallydetect COVID-19," Perumal said.

RNA or Ribonucleic Acid is one of the major biological macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. It performs various important biological roles related to protein syntheses such as transcription, decoding, regulation, and expression of genes.

"Primer sets, targeting unique regions in the spike protein of COVID-19, were designed and tested using real-time polymerase chain reaction," Perumal said. "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."

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