Cadila to make India's first indigenous antibody test kit: Health Minister

Cadila Healthcare Ltd. (Zydus Cadila) is set to make India's first indigenously developed anti-SARS-Cov-2 human IgG ELISA test kit for antibody detection of Covid-19 (novel coronavirus), Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said in a tweet on Sunday.

Developed by National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, the robust test will play "a critical role in surveillance of proportion of population exposed to SARSCoV2 infection", the minister said.

"ELISA based testing is easily possible even at district level. The NIV Pune technology has been transferred to Zydus Cadila for mass-scale production. The Drug Controller General has granted commercial production & marketing permission to Zydus," Vardhan further said in his tweet. An email query sent to the company remained unanswered.

This kit was validated at two sites in Mumbai and has high sensitivity and accuracy. 

The anti-SARS-Cov-2 human lgG ELISA kit has the advantage of testing 90 samples together in a single run of 2.5 hours, so that healthcare professionals can proceed quickly with necessary next steps on their patients’ triage paths.

So far, ELISA kits were being largely imported with focus of indigenous manufacturing largely towards real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test kits which takes up to eight hours to give results.

Meanwhile, Zydus Cadila has been involved in developing a vaccine for Covid-19 with the company already hosting animal trial phase and hoping to take it to clinical trials in the coming months.