Innovation and increasing exports are the focus for 2021

The COVID virus has made us feel its presence for over a year and made numerous changes to the way we normally live. The virus has sent out ripples of changes across almost every segment, creating new opportunities, stunning the growth of many segments while witnessing some exponential growth. Businesses in total are now seeing rapid changes with all the existing conditions that has been brought forward by the virus.

An array of changes was reflected on the IVD sector during this course of a year. The routine clinical chemistry tests had dipped since the onset. They initially slowed down as most of the population was confined to their homes during the lock down. The prominence of molecular diagnostics has increased by multiple folds with the rise in COVID-19 related tests by molecular diagnostics. The importance of molecular diagnostics segment and its relevance in the current COVID-19 pandemic and our struggle against it has made us to put forward developments in this segment. Agappe Diagnostics has rallied its resources to enter the segment at this critical juncture. Our aim was to introduce an affordable and efficient test platform that can significantly decrease the turnaround time required for the results. Our efforts have made us to come up with three such indigenous products with this deeply rooted concept in mind. The RNA extraction kit Agappe Chitra Magna, COVID-19 test assay Mispa Lumescreen- nCOV and the analyzer MISPA LUME. We developed our COVID-19 testing platform based on Reverse Transcription Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) which is simple, sensitive, and affordable which well suites the need of the Indian customers. MISPA LUME holds the accolade of being able to provide confirmatory diagnostic test for N gene and RdRp gene of SARS-CoV-2, which makes it, possibly, the first ever validated instrument to do so in India. The assay is designed in such a way that the positive sample can be identified from 10 minutes after starting the assay. The reagents are lyophilized for easy transport between 2 to 8 degrees and with a pack size of 48 tests/kit considering the Indian climatic conditions.

Even as the industry has slowed down despite the uneven roads of uncertainty in the market, Agappe was able to strengthen our production to support with the prognosis parameters that was required in the market. Parameters like CRP, D-dimer and Ferritin had a huge demand for the population due to its effectiveness in COVID-19 prognosis and our constant efforts has helped us to for making 1 million kits available in 24 days.

Apart from this we have also been able to roll out nine new products ranging from hand sanitizers, non-contact thermometer, automated biochemistry analyzers, the first indigenous 3-part hematology analyzers and reagents along with COVID-19 testing kits and instruments in molecular diagnostics based on LAMP platform.

The pandemic was really an eye opener for IVD manufacturers like us. It has proven that indigenous development of the product is the only way to bring in more benefits to our nation. In line with this, our plan is to strengthen our in-house R&D division with more industry-industry collaboration and industry-academia collaboration. With this kind of association, we are planning to bring in unique, innovative, and affordable automated solutions in clinical chemistry, immunochemistry, hematology and molecular diagnostics in the coming years.

We are proud to say that with our innovation and indigenization concept, we have become one of the biggest IVD exporters in India in rupee value and our plan is to expand our export division adding multiple new markets in the year 2021.