The IIT Alumni Council has launched MegaTx, an initiative to create an indigenous BioTherapeutics ecosystem for safe and effective treatment of Covid-19.

Under the initiative, MegaTx will design systems for mass collection and testing of blood plasma donated by those who have recovered from Covid-19. It will use the existing industry capacity for large-scale manufacturing of intravenous immunoglobins from verified donor plasma. It will harvest antibodies from the plasma.

The subsequent stage involves identification and characterisation of identified neutralising antibodies for mass production using recombinant DNA technology. That is to manufacture and purify the antibodies from stable, high expressing recombinant cell lines.

“The C-19 Task Force of IIT Alumni Council had accepted the challenge to develop indigenous biotherapeutics in India to help save lives of those adversely affected by Covid-19. We started off initially with the Platinae Open Source stack, which catalysed successful clinical trials on plasma therapy,” said Ravi Sharma, President and Chief Volunteer of the IIT Alumni Council, said.

“We are now taking a giant step and the MegaTx initiative will address the challenge of indigenously producing the required BioTherapeutics cost-effectively and administering them safely. This scale of biotherapeutic manufacturing has not been attempted in India,” he added.

“In order to meet the immediate need to save lives of critical patients, we are proposing to harvest antibodies from blood donated by recovered Covid-19 patients. Each donor can contribute around 25 millilitre weekly or one unit of blood roughly every three months safely. The task at hand thus is to create the infrastructure to process around 50,000 litres of blood every month to extract relevant immunoglobins for intravenous administration,” Arindam Bose, a IIT Alumnus and Chairperson of Therapeutics Group of the C-19 Task Force, said.

On June 26, IIT Alumni Council will create a social initiative fund of ₹21,000 crore ($3 billion), the largest in the country, to further improve social infrastructure through deployment of innovative technology.

In its fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, IIT Alumni Council is setting up a MegaLab in Mumbai with a capacity of 10-million Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests per month. The council has already partnered Mumbai University and ICT Mumbai as R&D partners and now scouting for industry partners to join its initiative in the fight against the pandemic through a global competition.

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