Tata firm launches 75-minute test for Covid-19

Business Standard 10 November

Tata Medical and Diagnostics (Tata MD) on Monday launched new diagnostic testing for Covid-19 — claiming it to be more efficient and simpler than the existing ones — with the ability to scale up test on a large scale across the country. The company's test Tata MD CHECK has been developed in partnership with CSIR-IGIB (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology),It has been approved by Indian Council of Medical Research and Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) and will be available through diagnostic centers and hospitals across India shortly.

The company said To make the test available across India, the company is talking to hospital chains, diagnostic players and laboratories for partnership and it is ready with a monthly production capacity of a million units a month to start with at its Chennai factory. We have come to a solution which provides end-to-end testing experience. We make the testing much more efficient and reliable and scalable, that creates more access and availability.

Moreover, this whole thing is developed in India," Tata Medical and Diagnostics CEO Girish Krishnamurthy said. In June. CSIR-IGIB came up with a breakthrough to detect the Covid-19 virus by gene sensing through innovation on a platform called FELUDA using the latest CRISPR technology, which is generally used for gene editing, he added. We partnered with IGIB lab and then worked very closely with them. Getting the whole science from the lab into a product, today we are ready for a commercial launch of the product within about 100 days.

We worked very hard toga this system," he added. Tata MD CHECK is a paper strip-based test with an image-based visual result readout. It requires standard laboratory equipment and small batches of tests can be conducted. Moreover, it has a fast reaction time of 45-50 minutes in the laboratory and the total testing time from RNA-extracted samples in the lab to result is 75 minutes only, the company said. Also, it can "provide high quality, quick results using standard equipment and minimally trained staff allow for rapid adoption.

The company is ready with 1 million tests/month capacity and scale with potential to reach remote locations of India". Krishnamurthy said this product does not require any complicated machine, unlike the current testing models, thereby makeing it easier to set it up in a lab. Besides, it also takes lesser steps as compared to the current models and hence making it less complicated and reducing inefficiencies. A major advantage is that testing can be done in any denomination of sample, while the current models of testing require the test to be run in batches of a certain number of samples and bring out the results in a batch.