New Delhi: The Indian Drugs Controller General (DCGI) has approved the commercial launch of Tata CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Corona probe ‘Feluda’. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) gave this information on Saturday.
“This investigation uses an indigenously developed, state-of-the-art CRISPR technique to detect the genomic sequence of the SARS-Cove-2 virus,” CSIR said in a statement.
The accuracy level of the Tata CRISPR probe is the same as the conventional RT-PCR probe, but it results in a shorter time, lower cost, and is easier to use. This technique has been developed by CSIR-IGIB (Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology).
Dr Debojyoti Chakraborty at the Council of Scientific Industrial Research’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) enlightened how his team had created the kit.
Talking to press, Dr Chakraborty said, “We were experimenting on sickle cell anaemia for the last two years. When COVID-19 cases rose in China, we started to experiment to see how mutations take place in the coronavirus. For the last two months, we have been working 20 hours a day to develop it.”
When he was asked why they have named Feluda, Dr. Chakraborty answered, “It will detect the presence of a virus in a just few minutes, like Feluda.”
The positive coronavirus cases in India have crossed the 53,00000-mark with huge deaths reported.
We hope the kits are as effective as Feluda in meeting the end objective.
