IIT Bombay Professor Built Quicker And Cheaper Covid-19 Sample Testing Tool

An IIT-Bombay professor has developed a novel method of pooling test samples to increase the speed and scale of testing the novel coronavirus in India.

IIT Bombay

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Reported first by the Print, Manoj Gopalkrishnan from IIT Bombay first conceptualised the idea in 2009, when swine flu wreaked havoc in the world, but at the time it was just an idea.

However, as soon as the pandemic hit the nation, the need for increasing efficiency of the tests while at the same time reducing costs became paramount, and that¡¯s when Gopalkrishnan decided to begin working on it.

He started working on it in March 2020 and in a matter of two months, had developed a testing tool along with ten other colleagues from IIT-Bombay¡¯s Department of Computer Sciences that he named Tapestry.

Tapestry is a single-round quantitative pooling algorithm that is used with RT-PCR testing. With Tapestry, Gopalkrishnan claims that it can drastically slash the time it takes to test samples while also cutting costs by 50 to 85 percent due to pooling.

Tapestry also recently received the necessary nod for commercial use as a non-regulated medical device and the tool has been put into use by Bengaluru based Algorithmic Biologics, Gopalkrishnan¡¯s start-up.

Samples from multiple individuals are pooled and tested in a single round with the help of RT-PCR where each sample is sent to three pools that make sure that the testing is in triplicate as well as results to be accurate.

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Gopalkrishnan explains that Tapestry uses a non-adaptive pooling method. Here, if a pool comes out positive, he might not know which sample is positive, but they can look at other pools and solve it mathematically to pinpoint the positive sample.

Reuters

An adaptive approach on the other hand is when your next step in testing is based on the outcome of your previous step, which according to Gopalkrishnan isn¡¯t very efficient for the labs.

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The former is more time-saving as it can test multiple samples in a single round. He also said that Tapestry can be used for workspaces and campuses as they're controlled and manageable microcosms. They¡¯ve been conducting a field trial since February at the International Institute of Information Technology.

However, according to Gopalkrishnan, it can also be used to test neighbourhoods or districts. For now, they¡¯ve teamed up with two labs -- LabAssure in Delhi and Dhitiomics Technologies in Bengaluru with more to join soon.