New Delhi, May 27 (IANS): Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday said that the CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Jammu, a constituent lab of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is to develop and scale up a new Reverse Transcriptase-Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) based COVID-19 diagnostic kit.

The lab has partnered with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) for the venture.

Taking it to Twitter, the Minister said: "CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Jammu a constituent lab of @CSIR_IND has partnered with RIL to develop & scale-up a new Reverse Transcriptase-Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) based #COVID19 diagnostic kit."

The Minister also said that the RT-LAMP test is rapid, accurate and cost effective that can be done with indigenous components and set up with minimal expertise and instrumentation.

India is constantly ramping up its testing infrastructure, along with indegenous development, validation and production of testing kits for RT-PCR in order to have early and aggressive tracing of the infection by validating TrueNat-based test for COVID-19 and including alternative testing platforms like CBNAAT/GeneXpert and Abott HIV viral load testing machines.