DRDO develops COVID-19 antibody detection kit ‘DIPCOVAN’

Defense Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), the research laboratory of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), has developed an antibody detection-based kit called ‘DIPCOVAN’.

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The kit will help people detect if they have previously been exposed to the COVID-19 virus and if their bodies had produced antibodies to combat it.

The DIPCOVAN kit can detect both spike as well as nucleocapsid (S&N) proteins of SARS-CoV-2 virus with a high sensitivity of 97 per cent and specificity of 99 per cent.

The kit has been developed in association with Vanguard Diagnostics Pvt Ltd, a development and manufacturing diagnostics company based at New Delhi.

DIPCOVAN is intended for the qualitative detection of IgG antibodies in human serum or plasma, targeting SARS-CoV-2 related antigens. It offers a significantly faster turn-around-time as it requires just 75 minutes to conduct the test without any cross reactivity with other diseases. The kit has a shelf life of 18 months.