IIT Alumni Council announces MegaLab Mumbai to attack Covid-19

IIT Alumni Council will set up one of the world's largest MegaLabs in Mumbai with a capacity of 10 million tests per month and will start identifying partners for the same through a global competition. While scientists are still at work to develop a vaccine, testing and biotherapeutics capacity have emerged as the biggest challenges.

"IIT Alumni Council has decided to set up the largest genetic testing laboratory for C19 and other infectious diseases after consulting global experts in the areas of virology, RTqPCR machine manufacture, test kits, pooling algorithms, AI, machine learning, robotics and microfluidics. A dedicated team has already started work on designing MegaLab Mumbai with a capacity of 10 million RTPCR tests per month," said Ravi Sharma, President, IIT Alumni Council.

"MegaLab will be based on the end-to-end Kodoy indigenous technology stack and will have adequate capacity for testing the entire population of Mumbai for infectious diseases, once a month," he added.

In pursuance of solving the C19 challenge facing the country, the IIT Alumni Council had created a C19 Taskforce with Dr. K. Vijay Raghavan as its Chairman and 20 IIT Directors as Members along with Distinguished Alumni of IITs within 24 hours of the lockdown announcement on March 25th, 2020. The Taskforce then formed various working groups involving 1,000+ dedicated alumni spread all over the world for finding / creating appropriate solutions to fight C19.

The IIT Alumni Council has been on forefront of finding solutions to the challenges of C19 and within hundred hours of being allocated space at the Poddar Hospital in Mumbai, the IIT Alumni Council, along with partner organizations, and Dr Muffazal Lakadawala's team, set up digital x-ray systems that successfully used AI to detect C19 for the first time in India.

The second outcome of the contactless technology partnership was design of the NSCI contactless isolation center which was launched on April 23rd, within one month of the lockdown. Subsequently, within one week of the NSCI center going live, the team launched India's first C19 Test Bus in Mumbai on Maharashtra Day. Pool testing recommendations were simultaneously released and submitted to the Govt for its consideration. On the 10th of May 2020, work started on indigenization of the test kits.