ICMR approves indigenous kit to detect Omicron

Tags: National News

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved an indigenous testing kit for detecting the Omicron variant of SARS­CoV­2.

• The kit is manufactured by Tata Medical and Diagnostics and is named 'OmiSure'.
• The kit can detect the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV2 as well as other variants of SARS-CoV2 in nasopharyngeal / oropharyngeal specimens during the RT-PCR tests.
• The test kit is compatible with all standard Real-Time PCR Machines. The first target is based on S-gene dropout or S-gene target failure (SGTF), and the second target is based on S-gene mutation amplification (SGMA).
• The company has applied for a license with the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), once the license is approved by the CDSCO, the kit will be manufactured by TATA MD at its Sriperumbudur facility in Tamil Nadu.

Currently the kit that is being used to detect the Omicron variant in India is developed by US-based scientific instrumentation company Thermo Fisher. It uses the S Gene Target Failure (SGTF) strategy to detect the variant.