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NEW DELHI: A cheap and rapid COVID-19 paper test will soon be available across India, and scientists hope it will help turn the tide of the pandemic in one of the worst affected nations in the world.
India has recorded more than 7.5 million infections, second only to the United States, and the outbreak has spread from densely populated megacities like Mumbai to rural communities with limited medical services.
The locally developed Feluda, named for a detective in a famous Indian novel series, resembles a homemade strip-paper pregnancy test and delivers results in an hour.
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The researchers are optimistic that its low cost and ease of use can help stop the spread of the pathogen in poor and remote areas.
“This test does not require any sophisticated equipment or highly skilled manpower,” said co-creator Souvik Maiti, a scientist at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in New Delhi.
“There are many remote parts of India where there are no sophisticated labs … (The test) will be much easier to implement; it will have much more penetration.”
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India currently diagnoses COVID-19 with RT-PCR tests, which are highly accurate but require advanced laboratory machinery, or antigen tests, which can give results in just a few minutes at limited cost but with significantly less precision.
Feluda, like other inexpensive paper-based tests being developed in other countries, claims to combine the precision of the PCR test with the accessibility of antigen kits.
It uses the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique, which recently earned its inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Feluda received regulatory approval from the government and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said last week that it could be rolled out in the coming weeks by Indian conglomerate Tata Group.
If available within that time frame, India will be one of the first countries in the world to begin mass use of such a test.
The price has not been published, but local media said it could cost around 500 rupees (US $ 6.80), about a fifth of what a PCR test in New Delhi costs.
The current prototype requires a PCR machine for processing, but scientists are working on a saliva or self-swab version that can be used at home, said IGIB co-founder and scientist Debojyoti Chakraborty.
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