On 8th July 20202, The Alumni Council of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Alumni Council) signed an agreement for joint research on COVID-19 and patient data analysis with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research – Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB).
Features of the joint research:
i.The IIT alumni council has delivered the first set of imaging data of 8500 patients of Mumbai collected from the pandemic facility at National Sports Club of India Dome(NSCI Dome) to CSIR-IGIB which will be made available in de-identified form over the open data platforms.
ii.The research will focus on creating an ecosystem for diagnostics and therapeutics for COVID-19 and a flexible platform for pandemic preparedness.
iii.The ecosystem will be a chain of expertise in the domains like, digital health, artificial intelligence, molecular diagnostics, next generation sequencing, antibody harvesting, and production of monoclonal antibodies.
iv.This partnership will provide data access to the scientists and innovators working in the development of testing and treatment solutions and will help in creating a data architecture for health data with high security.
v.The IIT Alumni Council is setting up the “MegaLab” in Mumbai, the world’s largest molecular diagnostic lab and “MegaTx” antibody facility for treatment based biologics as a part of this partnership.
Other initiatives:
The council has announced the launch of the worlds largest virology testing centre with a capacity to run one crore tests which will start with a 10 lakh test as its 1st phase by the end of July, 2020 and the 2nd and 3rd phase of over 100 days will be working on to increase the capacity upto 1 crore.
About IIT Alumni Council:
i.This is the largest body of Alumni, students and faculty of all the 23 IITs and other partnering technical institutes.
ii.The council is formed in 2019 to carry out projects with social importance.
About CSIR-IGIB:
CSIR-IGIB engages in the research of national importance in the areas of genomics, molecular medicine, bioinformatics and proteomics.
Director– Dr. Anurag Agrawal
Location– New Delhi
