CSIR signs MoU with Reliance to develop 'cheap & quick' RT-LAMP testing for COVID

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on Wednesday signed an MoU with Reliance to develop a new RT-LAMP COVID-19 diagnostic kit for cheap and quick testing to diagnose COVID-19. The Institute of Integrative Medicine in Jammu and Reliance Industries Ltd will jointly carry out this operation to scale up the production of the test kit. The COVID-19 RT-LAMP (Reverse Transcriptase-Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification) test is a nucleic acid-based test carried out from nasal or throat swab samples from the patients, revealed Director-General Dr Shekhar C Mande.

Read: ICMR Tells States To Fix Covid Testing Price With Private Labs After Removing Rs 4,500 Cap

"RT-LAMP test is cheap because you don't need to have instrument cost. It's also quite quick. You can actually take it into different areas. You can very quickly take it into the rural area," said Dr Mande to news agency ANI. It has been successfully developed and demonstrated using synthetic templates.

Dr Mande added that the new testing kit "could cost between Rs 100 and Rs 200. It will take less than an hour for a test to do. Within one hour, we can get the result."

The CSIR-DG also explained the difference between Feluda test and RT-LAMP kit. "Technological basis of Feluda kit and RT-LAMP kit is different. Feluda is based on technique call crisper cash, while RT-LAMP is based on RT-PCR. There is isothermal PCR. So, the technology of both kits is different," he said. 

While the normal RT-PCR test is more costly and it requires time in terms of its mechanics, including oscillation between temperatures 20-20 times, the RT-LAMP test uses using only four to six primers for the amplification of DNA. 

Earlier in the day, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had written a letter to states and Union Territories asking them to come up with a price cap for COVID-19 testing in consultation with private labs. This comes shortly after ICMR removed the price cap of Rs 4,500 for the real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test used to detect COVID-19 on Tuesday, asking states and UTs to arrive on "mutually agreeable" rates for the test with private labs. 

Read: India's Recovery Rate Surges To 41.61% From 7.1% In March; ICMR Hails Testing Strategy

Read: ICMR Clarifies 'no Major Side-effects' Of Hydroxychloroquine, Advises To 'continue' Usage

(With ANI Inputs)