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 is also scouting for partners to join its initiative in the fight against the pandemic through a global competition.

This comes at a time when scientists are still working on developing a vaccine, and testing, and biotherapeutics capacity have emerged as the biggest challenges, it said in a statement.

“IIT Alumni Council has decided to set up the largest genetic testing laboratory for Covid-19 and other infectious diseases after consulting global experts in the areas of virology, RT-PCR machine manufacture, test kits, pooling algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotics and microfluidics,” Ravi Sharma, President, IIT Alumni Council, said.

RT-PCR, a laboratory technique combining reverse transcription of RNA into DNAD, is now used for the initial testing of Covid-19 infection.

“A dedicated team has already started work on designing MegaLab Mumbai with a capacity of 10 million RTPCR tests per month,” he said.

“MegaLab will be based on the end-to-end Kodoy indigenous technology stack and will have adequate capacity for testing the entire population of Mumbai for infectious diseases, once a month,” he added.

On March 25, IIT Alumni Council had created a taskforce with K Vijay Raghavan as its chairman and 20 IIT Directors as members along with distinguished alumni of IITs. The taskforce then formed various working groups involving more than 1,000 dedicated alumni spread all over the world for finding and creating appropriate solutions to fight C19.

The alumni had earlier launched India’s first Covid-19 test bus launches in Maharashtra.

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