ICMR (The Indian Council of Medical Research) in Dibrugarh district of Assam, designs a testing kit which can detect the new Omicron varient within two hours.
About the ICMR testing kit:
A team of scientists are behind this gifted discovery which was designed at the Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC) for the Northeast region. The team was led by scientist Dr Biswajyoti Borkakoty.
In the initial days, the kit used to take atleast 3 to 4 days to tell I’d the patient was infected with the virus or not but now it just takes 2 hours of time to do the same.
The kit is now being produced on a bulk basis by an Indian company based in Kolkata, GCC biotech on a public-private partnership (PPP) model.
Statement:
Dr. Borkakoty said, “ICMR-RMRC, Dibrugarh, has designed and developed a hydrolysis probe-based real-time RT-PCR assay for detection of the new Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) that can detect the new variant within 2 hours. This is important because as of now a minimum of 36 hours is required for targeted sequencing and 4 to 5 days for whole-genome sequencing to detect the variant.”
“The kit has been tested against specific synthetic gene fragments of Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 within two different highly specific unique regions of the spike protein and also reference wild type control synthetic gene fragments. Internal validation has shown that the tests are 100 per cent accurate,” he further added.