IIT Delhi Collaborates With National Chemical Laboratory To Create Home-Based Testing Kits For COVID-19

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) Pune are working together on an alternative testing method that can be performed by individuals at home and will soon deliver quick results. 

The collaborative project between IIT Delhi and NCL has also received financial support from Microsoft India and the project is expected to be ready in a month's time.

The project aims to develop an ELISA (Enzyme-Linked Immunoassay) based diagnostic serological assay against COVID-19. If the project gets successful, it will create an economical, commercial process for manufacturing the antigens used in ELISA and home-based diagnostics kits to offer an effective, quick and affordable diagnostic solution to manage the pandemic outbreak.

IIT Professor Anurag S Rathore said, "Testing continues to be a challenge in managing COVID-19 and is likely to remain so for the years to come. At present, real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests to detect genetic material to perform COVID-19 testing. However, such tests can be performed in laboratories only, and require several hours, have low rates of specificity and sensitivity and pose risks related to specimen collection and sample handling."

He further added that these tests cannot be performed by individuals at home. The risks can be minimized by developing IgG and IgM based ELISA assays and home based testing kits.

The team working also said that the current testing methods available are "probe-based" whereas the one developed by the IIT Delhi team is "probe-free", which further reduces the testing cost without compromising on accuracy.

S Rathore continued explaining, "Coronaviruses are composed of several proteins including the spike (S), envelope (E), membrane(M) and nucleocapsid (N). The assay we propose will utilize the microplate-based enzyme immunoassay technique."

S Rathore who is also the Dean of the Institute did not disclose the price of the kit. But he said," The Kit will be considerably cheaper than tests being performed now. However, we will have some concrete results in a month's time and will be able to analyse then only."

The collaborative kits are being manufactured at the Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone (AMTZ) in Visakhapatnam and are expected to be available in the market from next month.

Using comparative sequence analyses, the IIT Delhi team has identified unique regions (short stretches of RNA sequences) in the COVID-19 and SARS COV-2 genome.