ICMR Approves Significantly Cheaper IIT-Delhi's COVID-19 Detection Assay

According to an NDTV report, with the current innovation, IIT Delhi is now the first academic institute to have received the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay.

The apex body had earlier halted the testing for COVID-19 cases using the China-made test kits because of extensive variation in test results, making the task of containing the outbreak all the more challenging.

Until now the available testing methods were "probe-based". The IIT team has a "probe-free" method, which decreases the testing expense without compromising on accuracy, officials informed.

"The test method has been approved by ICMR. The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100 per cent. This makes IIT Delhi the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay," News agency PTI quoted a senior official as saying.

"This is the first probe-free assay for COVID-19 approved by ICMR and it will be useful for specific and affordable high throughput testing. This assay can be easily scaled up as it does not require fluorescent probes. The team is targeting large scale deployment of the kit at affordable prices with suitable industrial partners as soon as possible," the official added.

The IIT Delhi team used comparative sequence analysis and identified unique regions (short stretches of RNA sequences) in the SARS COV-2 (novel Coronavirus that causes COVID-19) genome.

RNA or Ribonucleic Acid is one of the major biological macromolecules that is essential for all known forms of life. It performs various biological functions 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," PTI quoted Professor Vivekanandan Perumal, lead member of the team as saying.

"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 IITwhich includes, PhD scholars Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Pandey and Praveen Tripathi, postdoctoral fellows Drs Parul Gupta and Akhilesh Mishra and professors Vivekanandan Perumal, Manoj B Menon, James Gomes and Bishwajit Kundu, has claimed that the cost of performing the test is much cheaper and hence will be affordable for the general public.

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