Last week, the first made-in-India coronavirus testing kits hit the Indian market. Earlier consumers had to shell out Rs 4500 for the imported kits. India has now to beef up testing across the country for screening of patients with flu symptoms to confirm or rule out the Covid-19 infection; a cheaper kit was the need of the hour. Also, with borders sealed and each country fighting their own battles, depending on imported kits would have been a great hurdle for India.
The kit has been developed by Mylab Discovery Solution a Pune based molecular diagnostics company in India. The kit is called as Mylab PathoDetect COVID-19 Qualitative PCR kit. The firm became the first Indian firm to get full approval of Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation to come up with the kit. It shipped the first batch of 150 kits to diagnostic labs in Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru this week.
The molecular diagnostic company, which also makes testing kits for HIV and Hepatitis B and C, and other diseases, says it can supply up to 100,000 Covid-19 testing kits a week. Currently, ICMR has 100,000 kits and has ordered 200,000 from Germany.
Each Mylab kit can test 100 samples and costs 1,200 rupees – that’s about a quarter of the 4,500 rupees that India pays to import Covid-19 testing kits from abroad.
Minal Dakhave Bhosale, Mylab’s research and development chief headed the team that designed the kit. “Looking at the need of the hour, we got it done in record time of just 6 weeks.”
Medical experts say that this kit gives the diagnosis in two and a half hours while the imported testing kits take six-seven hours.
Bhosale has been mainly applauded for this work because she was also 9 months pregnant then. A team of 10 worked with focused attention to make the project a success. The kit was sent for evaluation to the National Institute of Virology (NIV).
India has been criticized for not testing enough. It has one of the lowest rates in the world, with just 6.8 tests per million. Now, hopefully we will be testing more.
