Why was this COVID-19 testing kit named after Satyajit Ray’s ‘Feluda’

India has created a new test kit and has named it after the famous Satyajit Ray-created detective character Feluda.

On Wednesday, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) constituent lab, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and Tata Sons signed an MoU for certifying of knowledge for FNCAS9 Editor Linked Uniform Detection Assay (Feluda) for rapid diagnosis of coronavirus.

The test is called the Feluda test strip, labelled after the investigator who resolves mysteries rapidly using his sharp intelligence. The Feluda series are some of Ray’s finest and most popular works. Feluda is also the lead character in two of his films Joi Baba Felunath and Sonar Kella essayed by legendary Soumitra Chatterjee.

Feluda, an original scientific creation, has been created to alleviate the ongoing COVID-19 situation and provide to mass testing.

Its chief benefits are its affordability, relative ease of use and non-dependency on expensive measurable polymerase chain reaction (Q-PCR) machines.

Banmali Agrawala, President, Tata Sons Infrastructure and Defence & Aerospace said, “This innovative CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Feluda test uses cutting edge CRISPR technology for detection of the genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus.”

“The technology used in developing the Feluda kit, which can be deployed for mass field testing of COVID-19 as early as the end of May, ‘is a completely indigenous scientific invention’,” the statement said.

WHY FELUDA?

Dr Debojyoti Chakraborty at the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) enlightened how his team had created the kit.

Talking to ThePrint, Dr Chakraborty said, “We were experimenting on sickle cell anaemia for the last two years. When COVID-19 cases rose in China, we started to experiment to see how mutations take place in the coronavirus. For the last two months, we have been working 20 hours a day to develop it.”

When he was asked why they have named Feluda, Dr Chakraborty answered, “It will detect the presence of a virus in a just few minutes, like Feluda.”

The positive coronavirus cases in India are nearing the 50,000-mark with 1,693 deaths reported.

We hope the kits are as effective as Feluda in meeting the end objective.