In the first week of April, CSIR announced a breakthrough in its war against the devastating coronavirus. CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) developed a low-cost diagnostic paper-based kit that could accurately test COVID-19 samples. In a major development recently, the diagnostic kit, which is to be deployed by Tata Sons, received approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for commercial launch as per ICMR guidelines.

The CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) test meets high-quality benchmarks with 96% sensitivity and 98% specificity for detecting the novel coronavirus. This marks a significant achievement for the Indian scientific community, moving from R&D to a high-accuracy, scalable and reliable test in less than 100 days. The ‘Made in India’ test achieves accuracy levels of traditional RT-PCR tests, with quicker turnaround time, less expensive equipment, and better ease of use. Besides, CRISPR is a futuristic technology that can also be configured for detection of multiple other pathogens in the future.

The paper-based diagnostic test kit, which is similar to a pregnancy test strip, has been developed by a young research team led by Dr Debojyoti Chakraborty and Dr Souvik Maiti from the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB).