Government Funded Start-Up Working On Rapid Test Kit

A healthcare start-up funded by the Department of Science & Technology (DST), which has been working on a testing kit technology that can speed up the testing process for Covid-19.
“Module Innovations, a healthcare startup is building on its platform technology for rapid diagnosis of diseases to develop a product for detecting Covid-19 with a 10-15 minute test,” the DST said.

Sachin Dubey, founder and CEO of the Pune-based firm told TOI: “We have the proof of concept ready and have some good initial results. Since we cannot procure the direct samples, we will soon be taking our product to the National Institute of Virology (NIV) for evaluation.” he added that the DST has made an equity investment of Rs 50 lakh in Module Innovations initially.

The firm, using the proven concept from its flagship product USense, which is used for bacterial infections identification, is now developing nCoVSENSEs (TM) which is a rapid test device for detection of antibodies that have been generated against Covid-19 in the human body.

“Given India’s population, we always knew that mass screening will be the route that India will need to take,” Dubey said, adding that the firm has so far invested about Rs 8 lakh into this product and that they would need at least Rs 35 lakh to scale it up and ensure that they can at least do 5,000 tests a day.

With the rapid test device, the DST said, it will be possible to confirm infection in patients and also determine whether an infected patent has recovered and also identify the stage of infection in the patients.

“While not being a substitute for the (Polymerase Chain Reaction) PCR-based confirmatory technique, the tests based on the detection of antibodies are being deployed globally for rapid mass screenings that take some of the burdens off from the limited number of PCR machines, and help in the formulation of strategies and decision making, among other things,” DST secretary Professor Ashutosh Sharma said.

Dubey said that his firm is completely indigenising the product so that it is affordable. “Right now all our testing kits are imported, and expensive. We hope to bring down the price to an affordable rate so that anybody wanting to test it can procure it,” he added.

The nCoVSENSe test is aimed at detecting the IgG and IgM antibodies generated in the human body upon the onset of viral infection and is targeted against the Spike proteins making it specific for Covid-19.

DST says that the test could also be used to screen patients and passengers at airports, railway stations, hospitals and many such settings thus safeguarding us for any future outbreak as well.-Times Of India