Saturday, 22 May 2021 | PNS | New Delhi
DRDO product to hit market in June
Days after launching an anti-Covid drug, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on Friday came out with an indigenously designed antibody detection-based kit named Dipcovan. A Delhi-based pharmaceutical company will produce this kit costing Rs 75 only. The kit is expected to hit the market in June.
Giving details here about the kit, officials said it can detect both spike as well as nucleocapsid (S&N) proteins of SARS-CoV-2 virus with a high sensitivity of 97 per cent and specificity of 99 per cent. The kit was developed in association with Vanguard Diagnostics Pvt Ltd, a development and manufacturing diagnostics company based at New Delhi.
The Dipcovan kit was developed indigenously by the scientists, followed by extensive validation on more than 1,000 patient samples at various Covid designated hospitals in Delhi. Three batches of the product were validated during last one year, they said.
The antibody detection kit was approved by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in April this year. In May, the product received the regulatory approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) to manufacture for sale and distribution.
Dipcovan is intended for the qualitative detection of IgG antibodies in human serum or plasma, targeting SARS-CoV-2 related antigens. It offers a significantly faster turn-around-time as it requires just 75 minutes to conduct the test without any cross reactivity with other diseases. The kit has a shelf life of 18 months.
Industry partner Vanguard Diagnostics Pvt. Ltd will commercially launch the product during the first week of June 2021. Readily available stock at the time of launch will be 100 kits (approx. 10,000 tests) with a production capacity of 500 kits/month after the launch. It is expected to be available at about Rs 75 per test.
The kit will be very useful for understanding COVID-19 epidemiology and assessing an individual’s previous SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh appreciated the efforts of the DRDO and the industry in developing the kit at the time of need.
