Indian Covid-19 test kit named after Feluda gets green light

India has given green signal to the commercial launch of a new coronavirus-detection technology named after master director Satyajit Ray's iconic detective Feluda aka Prodosh Mitter.

''Feluda'', the Tata CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Covid-19 test has received regulatory approvals from the Drug Controller General of India, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said late last night.

The name "Feluda" has been given because of the sleuth's pinpoint accuracy for zeroing on criminals.

The CRISPR is a genome editing technology developed by the Tata Group, the CSIR and the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology to diagnose diseases and meets high-quality benchmarks with 96 percent sensitivity and 98 percent specificity for detecting novel coronavirus, the CSIR said in a statement.

This test uses an indigenously developed CRISPR technology for detection of the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 virus, said the statement, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

The Tata-CRISPR test deploys a specially-adapted Cas9 protein to successfully detect the virus causing Covid-19, it said.

The innovation in the technology has been done by a young research team led by two Bengali scientists Debojyoti Chakraborty and Souvik Maiti.

India's total number of Covid-19 cases stand at 54,00,619 , including 10,10,824 active cases, according to Health Ministry data today.

In the 24-hour period, India, which is the second worst-hit country after the US, reported 92,605 new cases and 1,133 deaths linked to the virus. The total number of fatalities is pegged at 86,752, said the data.

For the second consecutive day, India reported more coronavirus recoveries than fresh cases. According to the Health Ministry data this morning, 94,612 people were discharged. About 43 lakh patients have recovered from the infection in the country, pushing the recovery rate close to 80 percent.