New Delhi, Oct. 15 (BNA): As the first wave of the pandemic began to spread in India, Sanchi Jawa and her 59-year-old father, Harish Jawa, realized they had symptoms of COVID-19 infection. . They decided to isolate and test — but that was no easy task during the spring of 2020, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The father and daughter had to make multiple calls to several private labs in the capital of New Delhi before they could arrange the gold standard in COVID-19 testing – the real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR.
It costs approximately $70 per test. Sanchi, 29, a digital marketer, and her father, a successful business owner, could afford it, but it was beyond the reach of the majority of Indians, whose per capita income is less than $160 a month, according to the World Bank.
“They (RT-PCR tests) should be within the reach of the common man, and everyone should be able to get them done,” Sanchi said.
After more than a year, most Indians can access PCR tests at a fraction of the cost – due to an extensive public-private partnership, known as InDx, which has built up the local knowledge and infrastructure to manufacture these tests within India.
Soon after the outbreak of the pandemic, the government of India, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, commissioned the country’s most advanced Center for Innovation in Biosciences — the publicly funded Center for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, or C-CAMP — to find a rapid way to produce the virus in-house for test kits.
But this was no simple task because most components of the RT-PCR test – including the mixers required for sample analysis – were not manufactured in India and had to be imported from China and South Korea, driving up prices.
With global trade almost to a halt, and huge demand for test kits from the US and UK, delivery has been significantly delayed.
Reagents, primers, and other chemical components – such as amidites and deoxyribonucleotide triphosphate, which are essential for the chemical analysis used to detect the presence of the virus – were not widely manufactured in the country and had to be imported. Even the accessory parts, such as the plastic bottles used in the testing process, were mostly imported.
Working with Indian medical technology manufacturers, along with support from Tata Consulting Services, the C-CAMP-led program has pushed through a rapid change.
India has expanded from 14 labs capable of conducting COVID-19 tests in February 2020 to more than 1,500 over the next six months. The country now has nearly 3,000 such laboratories.
The price of RT-PCR tests has dropped to as little as $7 in some parts of the country, nearly ten times as much when they were first made available.
The availability of locally made test components allowed the government to purchase test kits at as cheap as 50 cents per unit when purchased in bulk from manufacturers. Indian authorities can now offer free RT-PCR tests to those who cannot afford the fees, and set low-price caps for paid RT-PCR tests at private laboratories.
Lalith Kishore, COO of the COVID-19 Scale Up Program at C-CAMP, says the public-private partnership has helped more than 160 Indian companies innovate, create mechanisms and manufacture more than 1 million RT-PCR test kits per day. .
“A lot of these companies have enabled a complete reversal in terms of our dependence on imports in terms of diagnostics,” Kishore said.
India’s ramping up of COVID-19 testing capacity has enabled the country to conduct more than 580 million tests so far.
More than one million tests are still being performed daily in the country, and 80% of the test kits used are now entirely manufactured in India.
Manisha Bheng, managing director of health programs and initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation, which has pumped $3.5 million into the initiative, said she believes the increase in the availability of COVID-19 tests has allowed the country to implement a robust testing program that has helped public health experts devise more effective policies to deal with the virus outbreak. .
This was particularly important during the country’s second deadly wave of infections that peaked in May 2021 with more than 400,000 cases detected each day.
“The scale of the crisis would have been much greater, if we did not have the testing capacity to guide public health officials to understand how the outbreak is spreading,” Benji said.
She added that while the expansion in production of test kits and other diagnostic components has helped India fight the pandemic and enabled self-sufficiency in molecular diagnostics, it has also created a new market for countries looking to procure diagnostic technologies and test kits. .
She said middle- and low-income countries now enjoy “more stability, security, and access to affordable medical technologies”.
Cheap, and sometimes free, RT-PCR tests have given millions of Indians like Mohit Dapla, 23, a driver who earns $300 a month, access to a world-class virus test.
When he first developed symptoms in September 2021, his employer asked him to take a RT-PCR test. He was fortunate that the government dispensary near his home in New Delhi offered the test for free.
“There is no way to pay $70 for a test,” Dabla said.
AOQ