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'COVID-19 private tests a good first step': Biocon chief on what India needs to do more

Updated : March 23, 2020 01:22 PM IST

Masks are something that many countries are getting done under cottage industry scale.

A select few private labs have got the nod to conduct COVID-19 testing. Biocon's Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is expected to be the government appointed co-ordinator to get private labs to start testing COVID-19.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Kiran Mujumdar Shaw, CMD of Biocon said, “This is a very important first step because I think this is a stage where the government has to rope in the private sector to create huge capacity that we need in terms of preparedness whether it is diagnostic tests, hospital beds, ICUs, ventilators, and so on and so forth.”

Commending the ICMR, Shaw said, “I believe that roping in the private labs into expanding the capacity for diagnostic test is a very crucial first step and I must commend the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for doing this very expeditiously. I was involved with this; it was a very strong public-private partnership even in terms of the process. It was done in a record time of less than a week.”

Shaw said that COVID-19 is still under control in India, but we need to be very careful. “We have about 400 cases and 7 deaths. So, it is still very much under control, but the number of people under quarantine is huge and we need to test them urgently and start creating a database that tells us how severe the disease is,” she said.

Speaking about the number of private labs, she said, “If you look at the ICMR advisory, there is no restriction on the number of labs who can perform these tests. There are certain eligibility criteria which are about being an National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) accredited lab, having the capability to do real-time PCR, and having the bio-safety level to facilities to carry out such tests. There are many labs who already have been performing H1N1 tests which are very similar, so I think collection is very critical, because this has to be collected very carefully because you do not want to contaminate the people who are collecting the samples. So, this has to be done with protected garments, there are standard operating procedures. So, all these labs have to know how to do this that is the thinking behind how the labs can quickly come on board.”

Public health system in India is not robust, said Shaw. “This has exposed a lot of inadequacies and weaknesses in our public health system starting with ventilators. Now, under this circumstance, we also are going to be woefully short of masks. Masks are something that many countries are getting done under cottage industry scale. This can also be another opportunity to create employment,” she said.

According to Shaw, we have surrendered our manufacturing of antibiotics to China. “We are now discussing the importance of making sure that we are not now at risk like we are today to certain key starting materials for our APIs or for that matter antibiotics. All this was something that we were very self-sufficient in many decades ago and we have surrendered that whole space to China. I think this is the time where we have to take a restock of all that we have lost and regain what we have lost,” she said.

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