Genei Laboratories, a Bengaluru-based biotech company, has got the licence from IIT-Delhi to manufacture and commercialise the latter’s low-cost, real-time PCR diagnostic assay kit for Covid-19.

The National Biomedical Resource Indigenization Consortium (NBRIC), which facilitated the licensing, said IIT-Delhi is the first academic institute in India to get ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) approval for the indigenously developed kit.

As per the agreement, Genei Labs holds a non-exclusive licence from IIT-Delhi to scale up production and go to market with the kit. While standard RT-PCR kits in the market are probe-based, this design does away with probes completely. Instead, it detects Covid-19-specific RNA sequence in samples. As a result, the cost of testing is reduced to a fraction, making the kit affordable.

Genei will manufacture the kits in an exclusive Covid-19 testing kit manufacturing facility at the Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone (AMTZ) in Visakhapatnam. The kit is expected to be rolled out in early June.

“We are thankful to IIT Delhi-and AMTZ for considering Genei Labs for further development and large-scale manufacture of this unique detection assay for Covid-19. Using Genei Labs’ expertise in reagent manufacturing and kit-making, we will ensure an accurate, affordable, Make-in-India RT-PCR kit for the diagnosis of Covid-19,” said S Chandrashekaran, Managing Director, Genei Laboratories.

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