Aligarh, Apr 18 (IANS): An alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University has developed a coronavirus testing kit in response to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) call to all the countries to ramp up Covid-19 tests, the varsity management said on Saturday afternoon.

Nadeem Rahman has developed the antibody based testing kit which takes less than 15 minutes to give an accurate result. It costs Rs 500 and the labs charge is Rs 4,500.

Rahman was permitted by the authorities during the nationwide lockdown to reopen the NuLife Consultants and Distributors Pvt. Ltd lab, where he is the director, to develop the testing tool.

The testing kit launched in just a span of two weeks has been approved by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and regular production will start soon, said Rahman.

"We are confident of churning out one lakh kits a day to bring a faster and suitable solution for large-scale screenings," he added.

Thanking the UP government and ICMR for trusting his team, Rahman said that a testing kit will cost around Rs 500-Rs 600 and the price is likely to come down.

"The best part of this rapid and lesser time-consuming kit is that it is economical to produce unlike the expensive RT-PCR testing kits," he said.

Rahman added that the antibody based kit will ease the pressure on the pathology services struggling with Covid-19 detection presently.