21-Oct-2020: IIT Kharagpur Innovation has made COVID Testing Affordable
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has successfully validated ‘COVIRAP,’ the diagnostic machine evolved by the IIT Kharagpur researchers, for its efficacy in COVID-19 detection. Various commercial units have already approached the Institute for technology licensing to enable a rapid reach of this innovation to the common people across the State. After rigorous testing with the patient samples by an authorized ICMR laboratory, adhering to their strict guidelines, ICMR has now provided green signal to certification for this COVID-19 Diagnostic Test. This test has been designed to be fairly easy to conduct and it is quite affordable as well which may produce results in a custom-developed mobile phone application within an hour. Addressing a Virtual Press Conference today to announce this major development in the nation’s fight against COVID-19, the Union Minister of Education Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank said, “I am glad the researchers from IIT Kharagpur have achieved the goal of Aatmanirbhar Bharat through this medical technology innovation. This would go on impacting the lives of many in rural India as the device is portable and can be operated on a very low energy supply. Minimally trained rural youth can operate this device.” The minister added that the innovation has made “high-quality and accurate COVID testing affordable for the common people with a testing cost of around ₹ 500/- which can further be reduced through government intervention.” He said, “As informed by IIT Kharagpur, this machine can be developed at a cost of less than ₹ 10,000/- with minimal infrastructural requirement making the technology affordable to common people. The testing process in this new machine is completed within an hour.” Dr Pokhriyal congratulated Prof. V.K. Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur and the research team led by Prof. Suman Chakraborty and Dr. Arindam Mondal for this path-breaking innovation taking molecular diagnostics from high-end labs to the field.
The project received financial support from the Institute in late April 2020 as Prof. Tewari decided to establish a dedicated fund to support COVID-19 related research and product development as per an initiative by the Union Ministry of Education following the vision of Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the Minister.
Speaking about this test, Prof. V. K. Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur, said, “This is indeed one of the greatest contributions in the history of medical science, particularly in the area of virology, and is well set to replace PCR-based tests to a large extent.”
It is to be mentioned that the subsequent financial support to this project was provided by the IIT Foundation, USA, to meet the various expenses in the clinical testing phase. Partial financial support has also been provided from the Common Research and Technology Development Hub on Affordable Healthcare, established by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India, at IIT Kharagpur.
Dr. Shanta Dutta, Director, ICMR-NICED while appreciating the efforts of the fellow researchers stated, “While overseeing the testing and validation, I was very impressed with the portable low-cost machine unit that can truly be a game-changer for COVID-19 diagnostics at peripheral laboratories with the support of unskilled human resources as operators. This now needs a rapid commercial scale-up to cater to the needs of the underserved population. ICMR-NICED will be pleased to facilitate support for further improvisations in the method towards even superior performance.”
Elaborating on the validation process of ‘COVIRAP’ Diagnostic Test, Dr. Mamta Chawla Sarkar, an internationally acclaimed Virologist who oversaw the patient trials on behalf of ICMR-National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) said, “A detailed scrutiny of the testing results has clearly shown that this assay holds the capability of detecting extremely low levels of viral loads that any other method based on similar principles of testing, even those from the most celebrated research groups across the world, could not come up with so far. In practice, this means that very early stages of infection can be detected, thereby isolating the patient and arresting the uncontrolled spread of infection in the community via asymptomatic patients.”
This new testing method implements a highly reliable and accurate molecular diagnostic procedure that can be conducted in an ultra-low-cost portable device unit developed by the research team of IIT Kharagpur. The test results are rendered via a custom-made mobile application for dissemination without requiring manual interpretation.
This novel diagnostic platform, developed by the team of researchers is led by Prof. Suman Chakraborty, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, and Dr. Arindam Mondal, Assistant Professor, School of Bio-Science, IIT Kharagpur. This diagnostic device has been subjected to rigorous testing protocols as per the ICMR guidelines, at ICMR-NICED, an Institute authorized by ICMR. The tests conducted there have revealed that the results from this new assay are of standards comparable to the celebrated RT-PCR tests, with a remarkably high level of specificity and sensitivity, the two common parameters used as indicators of efficacy of any diagnostic test.
ICMR-NICED has further certified the test to be extremely user-friendly. Notably, the number of tests per one-hour batch in a single machine unit can be further increased for much higher limits, for the purpose of testing on a mass scale.
Elaborating on the test, Prof. Suman Chakraborty, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, said, “The patented machine unit has not only been proven to be robust during the patient sample testing but has also demonstrated to be extremely flexible and generic. This means that other than COVID-19 testing, many other tests, falling under the category of ‘isothermal nucleic acid-based tests’ (INAT), can be performed in the same machine. In other words, Influenza, Malaria, Dengue, Japanese encephalitis, Tuberculosis and many other infectious, as well as vector-borne diseases, can be tested using the same machine. This will virtually minimize the need for thermal cyclers or real-time PCR machines, without sacrificing the expected high standards of a molecular diagnostic test.” He added “Today, it is COVID-19; yesterday, it was Leprosy and Tuberculosis; tomorrow, it will be something else. This technology is all set to create a revolution in the rapid and low-cost detection of all these, by bringing high-end molecular diagnostics from the lab to the field. The impact of this, therefore, is long-lasting, empowered by the capability of detecting unforeseen pandemics in the coming years that may potentially endanger human lives time and again.”
According to Dr. Arindam Mondal, Assistant Professor, School of Biosciences, IIT Kharagpur, “During the testing phase of patient samples, all kits, exclusively developed at IIT Kharagpur, were transported in an uncontrolled environment for hours to the testing unit, which shows high levels of stability of the reagents that are being used for the testing.”
Speaking regarding the commercialization of ‘COVIRAP,’ Prof. Tewari, said, “While the Institute can produce the testing kit up to a certain scale, patent licensing will facilitate commercialization opportunities for medical technology companies. Any corporate or start-up may approach the Institute for technology licensing and commercial scale of production. The Institute is open to tie-ups, with due measures of protecting the interest of public health amidst the pandemic situation.”
19-Sep-2020: India’s first CRISPR Covid-19 test, developed by the Tata Group and CSIR-IGIB, approved for use in India
The Tata CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) test, powered by CSIR-IGIB(Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology) FELUDA, received regulatory approvals today from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for commercial launch, as per ICMR guidelines, meeting high quality benchmarks with 96% sensitivity and 98% specificity for detecting the novel coronavirus. This test uses an indigenously developed, cutting-edge CRISPR technology for detection of the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 virus. CRISPR is a genome editing technology to diagnosing diseases.
The Tata CRISPR test is the world’s first diagnostic test to deploy a specially adapted Cas9 protein to successfully detect the virus causing Covid-19. This marks a significant achievement for the Indian scientific community, moving from R&D to a high-accuracy, scalable and reliable test in less than 100 days. The Tata CRISPR test achieves accuracy levels of traditional RT-PCR tests, with quicker turnaround time, less expensive equipment, and better ease of use. Moreover, CRISPR is a futuristic technology that can also be configured for detection of multiple other pathogens in the future.
The effort is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the scientific community and industry. The Tata Group has worked closely with CSIR-IGIB and ICMR to create a high-quality test that will help the nation ramp up Covid-19 testing quickly and economically, with a ‘Made in India’ product that is safe, reliable, affordable, and accessible.
Commenting on the development, Girish Krishnamurthy, CEO, TATA Medical and Diagnostics Ltd, said, “The approval for the Tata CRISPR test for COVID-19 will give a boost to the country’s efforts in fighting the global pandemic. The commercialization of the Tata CRISPR test reflects the tremendous R&D talent in the country, which can collaborate to transform India’s contributions to the global healthcare and scientific research world.”
Dr Shekhar C Mande, DG-CSIR complimented the CSIR-IGIB team of scientists and students, TATA Sons and DCGI for the exemplary work and collaboration carried out during the current pandemic leading to the approval of the novel diagnostic kit and paving the path for further innovations towards making India self-reliant.
Dr Anurag Agrawal, Director CSIR-IGIB expressed delight that work started by CSIR under the sickle cell mission for genome diagnostics and therapeutics led to new knowledge that could be harnessed to quickly develop new diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2. He emphasized that this shows the interconnectedness of scientific knowledge and technology and the innovation of the young research team led by Dr Debojyoti Chakraborty and Dr SouvikMaiti.
12-Sep-2020: NIMHANS develops new Indian Brain Templates, brain atlas
A team of neuroscientists from NIMHANS have developed Indian Brain Templates (IBT) and a brain atlas. Neurologists, neurosurgeons and psychiatrists can use it to map the brain structure of their patients and make an accurate assessment.
The neuroscientists studied over 500 brain scans of Indian patients to develop five sets of Indian brain templates and a brain atlas for five age groups covering late childhood to late adulthood (six to 60 years).
The Montreal Neurological Index (MNI) template that we currently use is based on Caucasian brains. The MNI template was made by averaging 152 healthy brain scans from just a small slice of the city’s population in North America. But Caucasian brains are different from Asian brains. While some countries have their own scale to measure the brain, we are still dependent on the Caucasian brain template. What we have developed now is a scale that will measure an Indian brain.
The templates and atlas will provide more precise reference maps for areas of interest in individual patients with neurological disorders like strokes, brain tumours, and dementia. These templates and atlas will also help pool information more usefully in group studies of the human brain and psychological functions, aiding our understanding of psychiatric illnesses like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, substance dependence, schizophrenia, and mood disorders.
When most brain scans (MRI) are taken, they need to be compared to a standard brain template — a model or standard for making comparisons from a group of individual brain scans. This helps researchers identify parts of the brain. A challenge for researchers is that brain size and shape differs across ages, and across regions and ethnicities, and even greatly within any population.
While the vast majority of these differences are structural and are not associated with intelligence or behaviour, they do present a practical challenge of matching up similar regions across people, which is necessary for accurate measurements. These new population- and age-specific Indian brain templates will allow more reliable tracking of brain development and ageing, similar to how paediatricians monitor a child’s height or weight, for example, using a growth chart.
Although there have been similar attempts previously in India, they were typically focused on young adults and had a significantly smaller number of subjects.
Validation experiments and comparisons with existing international templates found that using the NIMHANS IBTs for Indian brains significantly improved the accuracy of alignment and thereby noticeably reducing distortions, errors or biases in final reports of brain structure and function.
The complete product is freely available for clinicians and researchers across India and the world. The datasets can be freely downloaded from https://hollabharath.github.io/IndiaBrainTemplates . It now requires to be incorporated in normal protocols of brain imaging in India.
29-Oct-2019: IIIT Hyderabad researchers create first ever Indian Brain atlas
Researchers at the IIIT Hyderabad have created the first ever Indian Brain Atlas (IBA). The next step is to prepare atlases for different age groups to study age related effects on brain anatomy.
The average brain size of an Indian was smaller in height, width and volume in comparison to people of the Caucasian and eastern races.
The immediate implication of this finding can be seen in treatment outcomes of neurological problems or brain related ailments - like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease etc.
Medical practitioners depend on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan to decide on the line of treatment. The references they use are the one’s created by the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), based on Caucasian brains.
With the revelations on the Indian brains, the differences in the MRI scans that can emerge by the comparisons (since Indian brains are smaller than Caucasian) can look alarming and lead to misdiagnosis.
The earliest known brain atlas, the Talairach and Tournoux atlas, was created by manually drawing post-mortem brain sections of a 60-year-old French woman.
It was in 1993 that the MNI and the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) created the first digital human brain atlas. More recently, MNI and ICBM have released other brain atlases that are widely used as a standard in neuroscience studies. However, these ‘standard’ brain templates created using Caucasian brains are not ideal to analyze brain differences from other ethnicities, such as the Indian population.
MRI images taken are compared with the pre-loaded MNI template to arrive at a diagnosis, and are likely to lead to a misdiagnosis. While even Chinese and Korean brain templates had been constructed, there was no corresponding template constructed for the Indian-specific population.
The first attempt by the IIITH team at creating an Indian-specific brain atlas involved 50 subjects, evenly balanced out across genders. MRI scans of these subjects’ brains were taken at three different hospitals across three different scanners to rule out variations found in scanning machines. Emboldened by the results of the pilot study, the team went on to recruit 100 willing participants in the eventual construction of the Indian Brain Atlas, referred to as IBA 100.
From birth, the brain grows at an alarming rate. But according to most experts, it is around age 20-30, that the brain is said to be fully developed, or ‘mature’. Hence the scans collected were from an equal number of healthy male and female subjects who fell in the age group of 21-30 years, considered as the baseline.
The constructed atlas was validated against the other atlases available for various populations. It was found that the Indian brain on average is smaller in height, width, and volume as compared to the western (MNI) as well as the eastern population (Chinese and Korean).
These differences are found even at the structure level, such as in the volume of the hippocampus and so on. But overall, the IBA 100 is more comparable to the Chinese and Korean atlases than the distant Caucasian one (MNI).
It is desirable to build a larger atlas with a greater heterogeneous mix of subjects to account for diversity, even in terms of educational qualifications. But currently the team’s focus is to understand the aging process itself. There are many changes that take place in a brain due to advancing age, with the most typical one being atrophy or shrinking of structures. In the case of dementia or Alzheimer’s, they are associated with atrophy of the hippocampus.