COVID-19: IIT Alumni Council to set up mega lab with testing capacity of 10 million per month
IIT Alumni Council will be setting up a massive genetic testing Lab in Mumbai that will have the capacity to conduct 10 million RT-PCR tests in a month.
With the number of coronavirus cases rising in the country day by day, IIT Alumni Council has said that it will set up a massive genetic testing lab, MegaLab, in Mumbai to conduct testing for coronavirus and other infectious diseases.
This massive lab will have capacity to carry out 10 million RT-PCR tests per month. The IIT body will start identifying partners to run these labs through a global competition.
In order to set up the labs, the council has consulted several domain experts from virology, RTPCR machine manufacturing, test kits, pooling algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and microfluidics.
“MegaLab will be based on the end-to-end Kodoy indigenous technology stack and will have adequate capacity for testing the entire population of Mumbai for infectious diseases, once a month," Ravi Sharma, President, IIT Alumni Council said.
RT-PCR test is a real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test for the qualitative detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2 in upper and lower respiratory specimens collected from people showing symptoms of COVID-19.
The Kodoy Stack is an end-to-end technology stack for molecular diagnostic laboratories. It can be a large central laboratory that will have capacity to conduct millions of tests every month, a point of care location such as a clinic with few daily test requirements or a moving vehicle such as a test bus. The stack relies on the self-extraction of samples by a patient and uses an RTqPCR machine and test kit.
After the announcement on March 25, the IIT Alumni council created a coronavirus taskforce with K Vijay Raghavan as chairman and 20 other directors from various IITs as its members.
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