COVIHOME: IITH develops affordable COVID-19 testing kit

Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad have developed India’s First Rapid Electronic and Artificial Intelligence-powered COVID-19 test called COVIHOME. This test can be performed at an affordable cost at home.

About COVIHOME test kit

• Test kit can produce results within 30 minutes for symptomatic as well as asymptomatic patients.
• This test does not require RT-PCR (Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction) test.
• A patent for this kit has been filed and researchers are waiting for industry partners for Transfer of Technology (ToT) to produce kits at mass level.

Efficiency of Test Kit

CSIR-Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) performed validation of rapid RNA electronic diagnostic device to detect SARS-Cov-2 virus in swab samples with in-house samples and hospital samples following the advice of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Samples were confirmed for positivity or negativity by RT-PCR method. Report confirmed kit’s efficiency as 94.2%, sensitivity as 91.3%, and specificity as 98.2%.

Cost of the kit

Each of test kit costs about Rs 400 now. But mass production of testing kit will help in reducing its cost to Rs 300 per test after ICMR’s approvals.

Objective of development

This test kit was developed with the objective of breaking transmission chain by providing affordable and fast testing.

Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH)

IITH is a public technical and research university in Sangareddy district of Telangana. Institute was founded in 2008 among eight young IITs. It was established by Ministry of Human Resource Development in accordance with Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 2011. Government of Japan had financially and technically assisted in setting up the institute. It started functioning on August 18, 2008 from its temporary campus in Ordnance Factory Medak. In July 2015, institute moved to 576-acre permanent campus in Sangareddy.

Month: Current Affairs - July, 2021