Pune firm develops Covid testing kit

Test time halved

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“The company has been able to shorten the test time to 2.5 hours as against the prevalent six to eight hours. The team of 25 scientists has created a solution that does both screening and confirmation jobs simultaneously.” Shrikant Patole, co-founder, Mylabs Discovery Solutions

Mumbai, March 24

In what may go down as an important solution in India’s fight against Covid, Pune-based Mylabs Discovery Solutions has created an indigenous solution to test patients, which can halve the time taken for results.

“The molecular diagnostic company, which received statutory approvals late on Monday from the authorities, can manufacture over 15,000 testing kits per day from its facility at Lonavala in Pune district and the same will be ramped up to 25,000 kits per day,” its co-founder Shrikant Patole said.

Citing the experience in South Korea, the World Health Organisation has been stressing the importance of tests to fight the pandemic, which has so far claimed nine lives in India.

Though around 500 persons have tested positive for the virus in India so far, experts are bracing for a sharp increase, fearing it may have spread across and also point out to a low level of testing in the country.

Patole said the company was able to shorten the test time to 2.5 hours with the “Mylab PathoDetect COVID-19 Qualitative PCR kit” as against the prevalent six to eight hours.

“The team of 25 scientists has created a solution that does both screening and confirmation jobs simultaneously. It started working on the solution six weeks ago, fearing that the crisis may eventually hit India,” he said, adding that the company had started as a trading firm in 2012 and diversified into research in 2016.

The test for Covid will also pick up positive cases among asymptomatic patients.

Patole said the approvals from the National Institute of Virology, Indian Council of Medical Research and Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) were received after a test sampling on patients at Mumbai’s Kasturba Hospital, which was the nodal location for treating Covid cases. He did, however, specify the sample size, where the kit was used to confirm results.

The Mylab kit was selected, along with a solution, offered by a German company for the tests.

Until now, India has been using kits prepared by the state-run National Institute of Virology (NIV), also based in Pune, but it was the fears over the increase in number, which made the private sector interventions in manufacturing necessary. “The kits cost up to Rs 4,500 per sample if we include both screening and confirmation,” Patole said, adding that allowing private labs to conduct tests was essential given the potential threats. The kit can work within the infrastructure for testing available with Indian diagnostic labs and does not require any new machinery. The company is in the process of creating similar test kits for HIV, hepatitis-B and also tuberculosis. PTI