The Hindu Business Line : Ocimum Bio’s test to detect swine flu

Hyderabad, May 6 As the swine flu fear continues to grip people and authorities screen visitors with flu-like symptoms from abroad, an Indian company has come up with a test to detect it fast.

A microchip-based probe, which was developed to detect avian flu (bird flu) three years ago, has been slightly modified and is useful in detecting the H1N1 flu, says Ocimum Biosolutions. It would be available in the next couple of weeks, after regulatory validation.

The updated custom chip probes have used the sequence information from the latest strain of the swine flu, which has been made available in the past 96 hours, Ms Anuradha Acharya, Chief Executive Officer of the Hyderabad-based company, said.

The CDC and US Food and Drug Administration have authorised the emergency use of an RT-PCR based molecular diagnostic assay to identify cases of swine flu in the current outbreak in the US.

MsAcharya said “Our bioinformatics team in India has redesigned the probe, which will quickly identify the H1N1 virus in patients diagnosed with Influenza A as some older tests may not pick up this new strain”.

“In a public health emergency like this, we want to make sure that we identify the right strain which is not picked up by current tests. We are ready to work with various public health labs in India and the region that need help in setting up these assays, or running the samples in our labs,” she said in a press release.

Both these assays can be conducted in a few hours and avoid the risk of patients with suspected cases infecting others when the wait is longer.

Already Indian companies such as Hetero Drugs, Ranbaxy and Strides Arcolab among others, have geared up to meet the drug requirement for treatment.