An All-Female Team In Vadodara Is Fighting COVID By Developing RT-PCR Kits For Virus Detection

Unable to help during the first wave of the pandemic, a group of six women stood firm and vowed to help during the second wave. Since deciding to wage their own war against the virus by developing RT-PCR kits for COVID-19 detection, the team has not taken a single day off.

According to a report by a leading daily, the all-women team has been working with Cosara Diagnostics Pvt Ltd (CDPL) since April last year, and has produced over 20 lakh RT-PCR kits.

Dr Swapnali Kulkarni, senior manager, technical services, CDPL said, “Our team has been making the kits manually and gradually our capacity has increased. From 8,000 per day last year, we now make about 40,000 ‘reactions’ per day.”

The team consists of Kesha Parikh, officer production, Julie Tahilramani, officer QA, Kirti Joshi, officer QC, Dr Jinitha Varghese, officer R&D and Janki Dalwadi officer R&D. Four of them work in manufacturing, while the other two work in research and development.

CDPL was established in 2019 and is owned by the Sarabhai Group, which has a joint venture with Co-Diagnostics Ltd in the United States and has a manufacturing facility in Ranoli.

Kulkarni further added, “When the pandemic began last year, we were uncertain about how to handle it. But the scare couldn’t pervade our enthusiasm and fortunately, all of us also had full support from our families. We had decided to make as many kits as possible as the demand for test was high.” To this, Chaula Shastri, director of Sarabhai Group expounded, “We were one of the first companies to supply the RT-PCR kits to Gujarat government when the pandemic began last year. Apart from Gujarat, we have supplied kits to Telangana, Hyderabad, Delhi, Karnataka and Maharashtra.”