That we are in strange times, is
the understatement of the year. The world is reeling from the COVID-19 crisis
and the vulnerable segments of our society are the most at risk. However, in
these strange times, Feluda remains a source of joy - both in the worlds of
fact and fiction. Yesterday kicked of Satyajit Ray's birth centenary year (2nd
May 2020, guru turned 99!) and it felt like the appropriate time to share these
stories I came across on social media and on the internet.
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FACT: On 18th April 2020, Indian scientists announced that they developed an affordable and easy to use test for COVID-19 and have named it after Feluda
Scientists at the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) in New Delhi have come up with a low-cost coronavirus test that will not require any expensive machines for the detection of the pathogen. CSIR is a department under the Union Ministry of Science and Technology.
Named after ''Feluda'', the detective character in legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray's stories, the test has been developed by Dr. Debojyoti Chakraborty and Dr. Souvik Maiti as a simpler way of detecting SARS-coV2 presence in clinical samples, IGIB Director Anurag Agarwal said.
L2R: Dr. Debojyoti Chakraborty, Dr. Souvik Maiti, and the team.
Just like in Ray's stories, Feluda
is accompanied by his long term companion Jatayu in the IGIB laboratory as
well. The IGIB duo created a web tool required for the test and named it after
the popular crime thriller writer (Jatayu alias Lal Mohan Ganguly) who
accompanied Feluda in most of his adventures. Feluda with a tad bit of help
from Jatayu is capable of cracking the Covid-19 mystery from the saliva samples
of suspected patients. The scientists prefer saliva over blood because it was
easy to collect even from elderly patients or babies.
On a prosaic note, both Feluda and Jatayu are scientific acronyms. 'Feluda' is an acronym for FnCas9 Editor Linked Uniform Detection Assay, and is a paper-based test strip detects the new coronavirus infection within an hour and can potentially be the solution for India’s urgent need for rapid-testing. The team was originally developing such a test for the 'sickle cell disease'. The test uses the cutting-edge gene-editing tool- Crispr-Cas9 to target and identify the genomic sequences of the novel coronavirus in the samples of suspected individuals. One of the most difficult parts of this pandemic is detecting people who could possibly have the disease. The machinery is expensive and uncommon, and individual tests can prove to be expensive too. This innovation will undoubtedly help many doctors and patients worldwide.
“We have been working on this tool for around two years. But, in late January, when the outbreak hit its peak in China, we began testing it to see if it can work for COVID-19. It took us around two months to come up with these results," Dr. Debjyoti Chakraborty, told LiveMint.
It starts the same way as a normal real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is the extraction of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and its conversion to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), Agarwal said. It then differs by using a specifically designed PCR reaction to amplify a part of the viral nucleic acid sequence. Then a highly specific CRISPR, FnCAS9, developed at IGIB, binds to that sequence, he added.
Using the innovative chemistry on a paper strip, the CRISPR complex, bound to that specific sequence, can be visualised as a positive band - like one sees in simple pregnancy tests. The total time required for the test is less than one hour.
“This strip will be similar to a pregnancy test strip, and will not require any
specialised skill and machines to perform, as is the case with other PCR-based
tests. This strip will just change colour, and can be used in a simple
pathological lab. The most important part is it will be 100 percent accurate.
In the laboratory, one test cost Rs 500-600. It takes about an hour out of
which nearly 45 minutes are needed for sample preparations. We have already
done 50 tests and carrying out more tests after obtaining samples from
different recognised testing centres.,” CSIR Director-General Shekhar C. Mande
told The Print.
Therefore the Feluda testing kit could also be a game-changer for costs and accessibility — the real-time polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR) used currently requires machinery worth lakhs of rupees and its price is capped at Rs 4,500 in private labs, but the ‘Feluda’ test could cost as little as Rs 500 and potentially sold over the counter at chemists, thereby made widely available.
"If successfully commercialised, which depends upon all its components being available at scale and the commercial product being successfully validated by regulatory agencies, it would allow the test to be done in local path-labs that do not have expensive real-time PCR machines, but simple cheap thermo-blocks used for conventional PCR," Mr. Agarwal said.
When asked why the test was named after Feluda, Agarwal said the researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of California, Berkeley also use CRISPR, but different technologies. They have named the tests as ''Detector'' and ''Sherlock'', so Feluda was an Indian version, said Mr. Agarwal.
While scientists in other countries like Stanford University and MIT have been testing this approach, this is the first of its kind to be developed in India. It's a true tribute to Satyajit Ray, whose centenary birth anniversary is next year, that something so vital was named after one of his characters. The fact that the scientists chose to name the test after Feluda, clearly gives an idea of the impact his literature had on the collective psyche of Indians.
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And here's the FICTION: Corona Rahasya by Jayabrata Das
(click on the images to see larger
view)
This image is by the super talent Saikat Sarkar @ The Canvas
Needless to add, none of this is my original writing and I don’t the copyright for this material.