The IIT Alumni Council has decided to set up the largest genetic testing laboratory for Covid-19 and other infectious diseases.
Mumbai, May 2020 – The IIT Alumni Council, which had earlier this month launched a Covid Test Bus, is now setting up a MegaLab in Mumbai with a capacity to test 1 crore persons a month. The council is in the process of identifying corporate partners for the project. It has reportedly begun trials in the high concentration areas of Covid-19 affected in the city. In the absence of a vaccine which is still estimated to be a year away, testing capacity has emerged as the biggest challenge. The MegaLab seeks to address this critical gap. The 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 manufactures, test kits, pooling algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and microfluidics.
According to reports, Ravi Sharma, president of the IIT Alumni Council, has said, “A dedicated team has already started the work on designing the MegaLab Mumbai with a capacity of 1-crore RT-PCR tests per month.” The 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 other infectious diseases, once a month. The lab will have an initial capacity for 10 lakh tests, which will go up to 30 lakh tests in the next 30 days and 60 lakh tests by the 100th day or the third phase.
The council has also set up a Covid-19 Taskforce under the chairmanship of K Vijay Raghavan, who is an IIT Kanpur alumnus and the principal scientific officer to the government, along with 20 IIT directors as members apart from many more distinguished alumni of the institutes as patrons.
This is the first time that tens of hundreds of IITians are coming together to work on a real-time project, and in national interest. The IIT Alumni Council is the largest global body of alumni, students and faculty across all the 23 IITs with over 100 city chapters.
