India has developed a new test kit and named it after Satyajit Ray’s popular fictional character Feluda.
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) constituent lab, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and Tata Sons signed an MoU on Wednesday for licensing of knowhow for FNCAS9 Editor Linked Uniform Detection Assay (Feluda) -- for rapid diagnosis of Covid-19.
The test is called the Feluda test strip, named after the fictional private investigator who solves mysteries quickly using his sharp intellect. The Feluda series are some of the most popular works by the renowned writer and filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
The license will include transfer of the knowledge for scaling up the knowhow in the form of a kit that can be deployed for Covid-19 testing on ground as early as end of May, reports the Times of India.
Feluda, a completely indigenous scientific invention, has been designed to mitigate the ongoing Covid-19 situation and cater to mass testing.
Its main advantages are its affordability, relative ease of use and non-dependency on expensive quantitative polymerase chain reaction (Q-PCR) machines.
Tata Sons Infrastructure and Defence & Aerospace President Banmali Agrawala said: “This innovative CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Feluda test uses cutting edge CRISPR technology for detection of the genomic sequence of novel coronavirus."
“It uses a test protocol that is simple to administer and easy to interpret enabling results to be made available to the medical fraternity in relatively lesser time, as compared to other test protocols.”
“We believe that CRISPR is futuristic technology that can also be configured for detection of multiple other pathogens in the future." he added.
Till date, India has reported 1,693 deaths and 49,400 cases of Covid-19, according to Worldometer.
The fast spreading coronavirus, which was first reported in China’s Wuhan, has claimed more than 258,330 lives and infected more than 3,727,800 people globally.
As many as 1,242,347 people have recovered from Covid-19, which has spread to 212 countries and territories across the planet.