The Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC) at Dibrugarh in Assam has developed a testing kit that can identify the new COVID-19 variant in just two hours.

Once available in the market, the kit will be a huge relief for travelers who have to wait for hours to get tested and the samples have to be sent for genome sequencing. The team of researchers tested and scanned the kit with more than 1,000 samples of COVID patients, including some detected for Omicron variant. Once the licensing process is complete, the kit will be available at testing laboratories for quicker identification of Omicron variant in samples. The research team is led by Dr Biswajyoti Borkakoty, Senior Scientist at RMRC- ICMR, Dibrugarh... (Financial Express, December 12, 2021)