Coronavirus update: Zydus supplies first batch of 30,000 COVID Kavach Elisa tests to ICMR

Zydus Diagnostics, a unit of Cadila Healthcare Limited, on Thursday said that it has supplied the first batch of 30,000 COVID Kavach Elisa Tests to Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) free of cost. The kits have been manufactured in technology transfer with ICMR-NIV of Pune for surveillance purposes, Zydus Diagnostics said in an exchange filing. The antibody tests are important for surveillance and evaluating the proportion of population exposed to SARS-COV-2 infection.

ICMR-NIV, Pune successfully developed an indigenous IgG ELISA test for antibody detection for coronavirus. The test has the advantage of testing 90 samples together in a single run of 2.5 hours. The technology has been commercialised by Zydus Cadila for mass scale production after development at ICMR-NIV, Pune.

"This reaffirms our commitment to do everything that we can to help the nation fight this healthcare challenge. We believe that the need of the hour is to be prepared in every way that we can with the latest diagnostic technologies and that is why we are providing the initial supplies at no costs," said Chairman Pankaj R Patel.

Earlier, the company had partnered with ICMR to be better equipped against infectious disease outbreaks, and help people, who are at high risk, particularly in distant, remote areas of the country. Meanwhile, the total coronavirus cases in India jumped to 1,12,359 on Thursday, including 63,624 active cases, 45,299 recoveries, 1 migrated, and 3,435 discharged, according to the latest update by the Union Health Ministry. The country recorded more than 5,600 coronavirus cases for the second day in a row with 5,609 new cases, and 132 deaths in the last 24 hours.

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