A method to detect COVID-19 which will significantly reduce the cost of testing, making it affordable for a large population in the country, developed by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi has got the approval from ICMR, officials said on Thursday.
IIT Delhi is the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay.
"The test method has been approved by ICMR. The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100 percent. This makes IITD the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay," a senior official told PTI.
Using comparative sequence analyses, the IITD team identified unique regions (short stretches of RNA sequences) in the COVID-19 and SARS COV-2 genome.