A medical college in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram has developed a diagnostic test kit that can confirm COVID-19 in 2 hours at a low cost, Union Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan announced on Friday.
Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in Trivandrum is an Institute of National Importance of the Department of Science and Technology. Besides the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Harsh Vardhan also holds the portfolio of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences.
"The confirmatory diagnostic test, which detects the N Gene of SARS_COV_2 using reverse transcriptase loop-mediated amplification of viral nucleic acid, will be one of the world’s first few, if not the first of its kind in the world," Harsh Vardhan said in a tweet.
The detection time is 10 minutes, and the sample to result in time (from RNA extraction in swab to RT-LAMP detection time) will be less than 2 hours, he said in another tweet.
A total of 30 samples can be tested in a single batch in a single machine, he added.
According to a graphics shared by the minister, the test kit, named Chitra GeneLAMP-N, makes confirmatory tests results of COVID-19 possible in 2 hours. It has 100%accuracy and matches with test results using RT-PCR.
The test kit, if widely available, can be a huge advantage for a large country like India. There are currently 13,835 coronavirus positive cases in India while the death toll is at 452.
