Chennai: The Indian Council of Medical Research has issued an advisory for the use of indigenously developed Feluda paper strip test, which is based on CRISPR-Cas9 technology for diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2, by the laboratories.
The paper-strip uses cutting-edge CRISPR gene-editing technology to identify and target the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in less than an hour.
The test has been developed by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIRs) Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi and has been validated by the National Centre for Biological Sciences and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
The test has been approved by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for use in the country.
In its advisory, the ICMR said, “The test works by identifying SARS-CoV-2 virus strain and uses a Thermal Cycler instead of a qPCR machine for conducting the test. As claimed by the manufacturer, no further RT-PCR based confirmation is required for samples that are confirmed as positives or negatives by the CRISPR SARS-CoV-2 test.”