On 5th May 2020, the Constituent lab of CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology(CSIR-IGIB) and TATA Sons signed an MoU for licensing of KNOWHOW related to the development for FNCAS9 EDITOR LINKED UNIFORM DETECTION ASSAY (FELUDA) FOR RAPID DIAGNOSIS OF COVID-19.
Key Points:
i.The Licensing includes the sharing of knowledge for scaling up to KNOWHOW in the kit form and deployment for the testing of COVID-19 on the ground within the end of May. The FELUDA for COVID-19 is designed for mitigating the COVID-19 situation and performing mass testing.
ii.The advantages of this are the affordability, ease of use and non-dependency on expensive Q-PCR (quantitative -polymerase chain reaction ) machines, used to detect, characterize and quantify nucleic acids for numerous applications
iii.The partnership between the CSIR-IGIB and TATA sons will be utilized for the development and commercialisation of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats(CRISPR) based technology for the detection of COVID-19.
iv.The technology of CRISPR can be configured for the detection of multiple pathogens in the future. The Cas9 technology of CRISPR is utilized to specifically identify the COVID-19 sequence in the sample.
v.The CRISPR biology and paper-strip chemistry combined to develop the visible signal readout on a strip of paper which can be used for assessment for the presence of viral infection in the sample.
Feluda test Kit:
i.The test was developed by Debojyoti Chakraborty and Souvik Maiti for detecting SARS-coV2 in a sample and was named after the detective character in the stories of Satyajit Ray.
ii.It uses a specifically designed PCR reaction to amplify the part of the viral nucleic acid sequence. The FnCAS9 binds the sequence.
About IGBI:
Director– Anurag Agarwaal
Head, Planning Monitoring and Evaluation– Jyoti Yadav
Head HR– Sarala Balachandran
Location– Delhi
About CSIR:
Director-General -Dr Shekhar C Mande
