IIT Delhi is the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay

A method to detect COVID-19 which will significantly reduce the cost of testing, making it affordable for a large population in the country, developed by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi has got the approval from ICMR, officials said on Thursday.

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IIT Delhi is the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay.

“The test method has been approved by ICMR. The assay has been validated at ICMR with a sensitivity and specificity of 100 percent. This makes IITD the first academic institute to have obtained ICMR approval for a real-time PCR-based diagnostic assay,” a senior official told PTI.

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