Made-in-India paper-based strip for rapid, mass testing for Covid-19

NEW DELHI: A lab of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) which developed ‘Feluda’ — a paper-based test strip for Covid-19 which is named after the fictional detective created by Satyajit Ray — on Tuesday joined hands with Tata Sons for its deployment and widespread use for rapid mass testing on ground as early as this month end.

A completely indigenous scientific invention, ‘Feluda’ has been designed for mitigating the ongoing Covid-19 situation and to cater to mass testing. Its main advantages are its affordability, relative ease of use and non-dependency on expensive Q-PCR machines.

The ‘Feluda’ is developed by the the CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB).

“The CSIR labs such as CSIR-IGIB have been working on deep science and developing cutting edge technology and I am happy to see that the leading industry, TATA Group, is partnering towards its deployment. The strong partnership with industry in tackling the novel coronavirus has been the hallmark of the CSIR’s strategy in mitigation of Covid1-9,” said Shekhar C Mande, director general, CSIR.

The CSIR-IGIB and TATA Sons have signed a MoU for licensing the know-how related to “development of a kit for rapid and accurate diagnosis” of Covid-19.

“We are happy to enter into a partnership with IGIB of CSIR for further development and commercialisation of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) based technology for Covid-19 detection,” said Banmali Agrawala, president, Infrastructure and Defence & Aerospace, Tata Sons.

Speaking about innovative CRISPR ‘Feluda’ test, he said, “It uses a test protocol that is simple to administer and easy to interpret enabling results to be made available to the medical fraternity in relatively lesser time, as compared to other test protocols.”