#BUCovid-19: Accelerate plasma therapy to combat the virus, says Kiran Mazumdar Shaw

The coronavirus pandemic has brought together medical, scientific, engineering and IT communities as a united front in the fight against Covid-19, said Kiran Mazumdar Shaw , EC, Biocon Limited.Speaking at the inaugural session of the “Global Online Conference on Combating Covid-19: Biotech to the Rescue” organised by Bennett University , she said the country has risen to the occasion and has shown its capability to develop test kits.“India has arisen to the occasion with indigenous kits to face the challenge of the insufficient availability of diagnostic kits,” she said.Kiran said the pandemic has shown India’s capability in developing test kits as quite a few groups are now involved in developing them. “Right now, we need to import a lot of components for the test kit. We are almost an assembler of the kit. But we need to indigenise every component of the kit and we realised we have those capabilities,” she said.Shahid Jameel, CEO of Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance, said, “There are two very large trials happening across the world to test the efficacy of drugs including WHO solidarity trial which is being done in multiple countries including India which will test Remdesivir, protease inhibitors, combination of some of these with interference of beta and it will also test hydroxychloroquine.”“The second trial is funded by Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation and Master Card. This is called an accelerated trial which will look at the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine,” he added.