A three-unit mobile testing lab developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science was officially handed over to the Bengaluru Medical College and Research Institute (BMCRI) on August 5 afternoon.

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A professor at IISc’s Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics, Dr Sai Shiva Gorthi, who was instrumental in the unit design, said that the development of the unit had originated out of a need to plug critical gaps in COVID-19 diagnosis and testing across the country. With the number of cases going up, the priority is to scale up diagnostic testing capabilities and cut down turnaround times from sample collection to test results from one to three days to a few hours,” he said.

The mobile unit has been in development since the start of the pandemic in March and it is said to be capable of carrying out 320 tests per day, 80 of them in one go. The unit, Dr Gorthi, explained is currently spread across a Tata Force Traveller van, which is designed to collect swab samples from areas and two Tata Winger vehicles - one to carry out RNA extraction and the other to conduct the RT-PCR test.

The project design was approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on May 16. The CEO of Shankmukha, an IISc-incubated startup that manufactured the lab setup within the vans, said that the mobile unit can carry out 100 tests per shift. “It is unclear how many shifts the state will operate, but most labs operate two shifts,” he said.