Context: IIT Kharagpur has successfully commercialised its flagship healthcare product COVIRAP the novel diagnostic technology to zero on infectious diseases including COVID-19.

• The results can be made available within 45 minutes of obtaining the patient sample.
• The commercialisation of COVIRAP will initiate complete indigenisation and availability of a large range of affordable healthcare products in the Indian market as well as deep trenches of a large global market that is literally starving for the need of such technology.
• The COVID-19 diagnostic test can be conducted directly from human swab samples in the portable device developed by the team, without requiring any separate facility for RNA extraction.
• The kit has also been also supplemented with a free smartphone app to facilitate unambiguous results interpretation and automated dissemination to the patients.
• For use of the test, the nasal, as well as oral swab samples, are diluted in a solution and tested in the portable device by mixing with reagents that are supplied in a pre- mixed form, test runs automatically in the device without intermediate manual intervention.
• COVIRAP test overcomes several potential bottlenecks faced by similar other tests in the past, for instance, poor performance outside highly controlled laboratory and lack of simple, affordable, yet generic and universal instrument that may be used for home-based testing and community healthcare for a wide variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases.

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https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/iit-kharagpur-launches-covirap-diagnostic-technology/article34376251.ece?utm_source=health&utm_medium=sticky_footer

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