BENGALURU: Three indigenous diagnostic kits — the testing cost of which have been pegged at around Rs 1,000, less than a quarter of the current cost of Rs 4,500 with imported kits — have been backed by a special Covid-19 accelerator in Bengaluru for further funding and scaling up. The three firms are: CoSara Diagnostics , Huwel Life Sciences and DNAXperts The CCAMP Covid-19 Innovations Deployment Accelerator (C-CIDA) a special platform is pushing for three Indian companies to help ramp up India’s testing rates.Stating that as per the WHO guidelines, mass testing is one of the major containment strategies for the pandemic, CCAMP (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms) said that India’s national testing average is still low at about 500 tests-per-million (TPM).“The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) too has also called to urgently increase testing rates especially in the hotspots. While imported test kits remain an option, there are considerable logistics and affordability hurdles to cross. Also recent reports have raised doubts on their effectiveness and accuracy. Under these circumstances the faster we turn to locally manufactured low- cost, rapid and reliable diagnostic kits the better it will be to boost the number of tests to ICMR’s target of 1 lakh a day,” CCAMP said.CoSara Diagnostics was the first Indian company to get a test licence from CDSCO in late March. The kit that was in a fast-track validation study in NIV, Pune has now received a manufacturing licence and is ready to hit the market. The kit gives results in two-and-a-half hours and costs a fraction of imported kits. They have a capacity to produce 20,000 kits a day. Huwel Lifesciences Pvt Ltd is an end-to-end locally made and locally sourced kit that has received ICMR approval and NARI validation in late March. Theirs is a real-time qualitative PCR kit for quick diagnostics that reduces the testing time to less than 2 hours.“Moreover, all molecular reagents and diagnostic consumables are being made in-house, an otherwise major loophole in availability and cost management. Their ultrafast and sensitive chip-based PCR can handle large volumes at ease making a rapid and confirmatory diagnosis affordable and accessible. The firm has just deployed a consignment of 10,000 kits in Telangana with two more orders on the way,” CCAMP said.DNAXperts is an indigenously developed fast, real-time PCR kit for RNA detection. It uses special probes for enhanced sensitivity and specificity and takes less than an hour to test. A second kit that they have proposed does away with RNA extraction by directly putting swab samples in the buffer.This test is expected to further reduce time for results. DNAXperts is currently undergoing ICMR approval for both these kits. They can produce 8,000-10,000 kits a day with a capacity to scale up to 1 lakh kits.