B’luru-based start-up develops electrochemical ELISA test for Covid antibody concentration

Bengaluru: A Bengaluru-based start-up has developed a novel, point-of-care electrochemical ELISA test that enables fast and accurate estimation of total antibody concentration of COVID-19 in clinical samples, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) said on Saturday.

PathShodh Healthcare, the start-up incubated at the Society for Innovation and Development (SID), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has made a very significant breakthrough to develop the first-of-its-kind, semi-quantitative electrochemical ELISA test for COVID-19 IgM and IgG antibodies.

While qualitative analysis detects constituent elements in the sample, semi-quantitative analysis gives an approximate estimation of their concentrations.

PathShodh has received the licence to manufacture for sale from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) after validation at Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad, the DST said.

This novel technology and product was supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its initiative on Centre for Augmenting WAR with COVID-19 Health Crisis (CAWACH). The effort was coordinated through SINE at IIT Bombay and IKP Knowledge Park, Hyderabad.

The test kit comes in two parts. One is the hand-held analyser which reads the blood sample and gives a detailed report.

The other is a test strip where a drop of blood from one’s fingertip is inserted into the device.

The hand-held device provides the results within five minutes, the results of which can be downloaded on your mobile phone. It has been developed, leveraging PathShodh’s Lab-on-Palm platform “anuPathTM”, which interfaces with disposable test strips functionalized with immunoreceptors specific to COVID-19 antibodies, it added.

As the results are automatically displayed by the hand-held reader, there are no subjective errors due to the manual readout of test results.

The other unique features of this technology include onboard memory to store more than 1 lakh real-time test results, touch screen display, rechargeable battery, Bluetooth connectivity to smart phone and cloud storage, capabilities to map the patient data to Aadhaar number, and the possibility of connecting test data through APIs to Aarogya Setu, it added.