The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) has designated KGMU as the Center of Excellence for the COVID-19 trial. Three types of kits and reagents have been allowed to be tested. Recently, KGMU declared kits of China and South Korea to fail the test. The kit was subsequently banned by ICMR in testing the covid-19.
Viral transport media, VTM kits 2. RNA extract kits and RTPCR kits for covid-19 can be certified. The manufacturers of the kits will now contact KGMU to get their kits tested. He said that KGMU has not yet certified any commercial kits. The institute is still being provided with RTPCR kits from ICMR.
He said that at present, there are a total 5000 corona testing facilities in 20 laboratories of the state. Soon it will be increased to 10 thousand. Head of Department of Microbiology Prof. Amita Jain said that till now the certification of kits was done only by NIV Pune, but now KGMU will also do it. They reported that viral transport media in three kits is a tube in which samples are collected. Therefore, it must be of high quality. Otherwise the investigation will not be correct whereas RNA extract kits extract the RNA or genome of the infection. The third kit is RTPCR, through which the nucleic acid of covid-19 is identified. At present, only the RTPCR is being investigated in KGMU.
