The technology developed by the ICMR- Regional Medical Research Centre, North East, Dibrugarh cuts down test time
Indian Council of Medical Research is ready to transfer technology for a rapid TB test based on gene editing. The test cuts down the time for a confirmatory TB test from a few days to a few hours. The technology has been developed by the ICMR- Regional Medical Research Centre, North East, Dibrugarh.
ICMR has invited expressions of interest from the private sector for to undertake further development, manufacture, sell, and commercialization of a CRISPR Cas based TB detection system. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a section of the bacterial genome that is often used to invade host organisms and damage their cellular mechanisms. In the laboratory it is used for the purposes of gene editing. The technology in question is designed to detect the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis which is the causative organism for tuberculosis.
In its notice inviting EOIs, ICMR has said: “Conventional diagnostic techniques for TB commonly rely on culture (which requires 42 days to confirm as TB negative), microscopy, and nucleic acid-based methods. These are time-consuming and may require sophisticated equipment. Additionally, some molecular diagnostic methods, while offering improved sensitivity, may lack the desired specificity or face challenges associated with cost and ease of handling. Considering the above problems, the CRISPR-Cas12a-based molecular diagnostic system ‘GlowTBPCRKit’ coupled with an amplification step (using thermal cycler) and the ‘RapidGlow device’ provides a promising solution.”
India has the highest tuberculosis burden in the world and has committed to eliminate the disease by 2025, five years ahead of the global deadline of 2030. The healthcare system is still struggling to recover from the setback that happened to the TB control initiative because of the COVID19 lockdown.
