Kerala institute's test kit can confirm COVID-19 in 2 hours: Harsh Vardhan

Union Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan on Friday (April 17) said the Kerala-based Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Science and Technology has developed a low-cost diagnostic test kit that can confirm COVID-19 in two hours.

“The diagnostic test kit developed by the Thiruvananthapuram institute can detect coronavirus in 10 minutes, and the sample to result time will be less than two hours,” Vardhan tweeted.

A total of 30 samples can be tested in a single batch on a single machine, he said.

“The confirmatory diagnostic test, which detects the N Gene of #SARS_COV_2 using reverse transcriptase loop-mediated amplification of viral nucleic acid, will be one of the world’s first few, if not the first of its kind in the world,” Vardhan tweeted.