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Feluda to crack the COVID-19 mystery, Jatayu in tow

Last Updated 20 April 2020, 04:47 IST

An indigenous paper-strip test, named after one of India’s most famous fictional private investigators, has shown promise in detecting COVID-19 in an hour’s time using sophisticated gene-editing technology.

Buoyed by the success in the laboratory, its developers from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, here – one of the CSIR laboratories - are in talks with companies for establishing a supply chain to scale up the production and technology transfer.

IGIB scientists Debojyoti Chakraborty and Souvik Maiti named the test after Feluda alias Prodosh C Mitter – the character created by legendary Satyajit Ray, who wrote 35 Feluda stories and made two films.

After the maestro’s death, his son Sandip Ray also made Feluda films and television serials.

Just like the book, Feluda is accompanied by his long term companion Jatayu in the IGIB laboratory as well. The IGIB duo created a web tool required for the test and named it after the popular crime thriller writer (Jatayu alias Lal Mohan Ganguly) who accompanied Feluda in most of his adventures.

On a prosaic note, both Feluda and Jatayu are scientific acronyms. But like the Ray titles, Feluda with a tad bit of help from Jatayu is capable of cracking the Covid-19 mystery from the saliva samples of suspected patients. The scientists prefer saliva over blood because it was easy to collect even from elderly patients or babies.

“Our paper strip test is something similar to do-it-yourself pregnancy tests. However, ours is not a home test as a basic laboratory set up is required,” Chakraborty told DH.

The team was originally developing such a test for the sickle cell disease. When the pandemic struck, they decided to repurpose the technology for Covid-19. The indigenous test senses the unique genetic material of the coronavirus. Unlike the antibody-based rapid test currently being used by the government for surveillance in hotspots and containment zones, the IGIB diagnostic kit relies on DNA-protein interaction for successful diagnosis.

“In the laboratory, one test cost Rs 500-600. It takes about an hour out of which nearly 45 minutes are needed for sample preparations. We have already done 50 tests and carrying out more tests after obtaining samples from different recognised testing centres,” he said.

For comparison, private diagnostic laboratories offer the RT-PCR test for Covid-19 at a price of Rs 4,500 and it takes more than a day to get the results.

Another factor behind the diagnosis’s unique nomenclature is two other competitive tests being developed at MIT and the University of California, Berkley. The first one has been named Sherlock after the world-famous investigator while the second one is called Detector.

Chakraborty claimed that specificity and sensitivity of the IGIB test were at par with similar diagnostics. However, he refused to disclose the figures.
“The main step is to work out a supply chain for scale-up in view of the difficulties in import. In view of the urgency, we are going straight to major companies to explore the option of indigenous production,” said IGIB director Anurag Agarwal.

The researchers are yet to publish the findings in a peer-reviewed journal. But a paper with some of the technical details is available for the peers in the open domain.

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(Published 19 April 2020, 14:34 IST)

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