New Delhi, Mar 25 (UNI) With aim to combat the COVID19 outbreak, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) under Department of Science and Technology, is working overtime on the development of cost-effective and accurate diagnostic kits for wide distribution.
In statement released on Wednesday, the CCMB Director RK Mishra said, “We are helping our incubating companies, they have come out with ideas and we are supporting them. We are testing and validating the diagnostic kits proposed by them. We may come up with some good kits and it may take at least two or three weeks if everything goes well”.
Quality and accuracy of the kits are the most important things. If the kits give 100 percent results, then only they will be approved, he added.
The organisation is also keeping in mind the cost and as per their estimate, the test should be less than Rs1000 and simultaneously working on Kits as cheap as Rs 400-500.
Further, CCMB is also planning to culture the covid-19 as the institution has facilities for this and they have got the approvals from the Government too but they are yet to receive sample and kits to initiate the culture, Dr`Mishra further said.
“In the meantime, our facilities are set and we are actually training people who are going for the testing in other recognised places in the city” he said.
There are five government designated testing centres in Telangana whereas the CCMB has trained 25 people so that they can go and do the testing in these centres.
Dr Mishra also said that there were some labs where the COVID-19 testing will be done include Nizam's Institute Of Medical Sciences (NIMS) Hydrabad, Gandhi Hospital, Osmania General Hospital, Sir Ronald Ross Institute of Tropical and Communicable Diseases or the Fever Hospital and the Warangal Hospital. The Centre for DNA Finger Printing and Diagnostics (CDFD) is also likely to be added to this group.
The CCMB Director also said that when the virus will be cultured, we will try to set up a system as it can be used for screening.
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