India is ramping up monkeypox testing amid rising infections: Here's how

With nine laboratory-confirmed cases of monkeypox in the country and low testing due to social prejudices associated with the disease, India is ramping up its testing capacity for monkeypox, through both state and private initiatives.

According to a report by the Business Standard, the recently-formed Central Task Force on Monkeypox has stressed the importance of developing diagnostic kits and vaccines for the contagious disease, which has thus far been primarily detected among gay and bisexual men, despite it not being classified as a sexually transmitted disease.

Additionally, experts have also suggested that point-of-care tests, screening, and a widespread testing network in the hinterlands can help arrest the spread of monkeypox.

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In accordance with the same, pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies in India have stepped up efforts to make monkeypox testing both quick and accessible.

One such firm is Goa-based Molbio Diagnostics which has developed a monkeypox test kit using its Truenat platform which is widely used in tuberculosis testing.

“Truenat is the only point-of-care RT-PCR platform used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to detect tuberculosis. The test is developed on the Truenat platform, and there are around 5,000 such machines deployed across India, including rural areas,” Molbio founder, director, and CEO Sriram Natarajan told BS, commenting on the logic behind leveraging the Truenat platform.

Gurugram-based in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) startup Genes2Me, meanwhile, has also developed an RT-PCR test kit for monkeypox, available in both a standard version and a point-of-care (POC) version, which has a quick turnaround time of 50 minutes.

Currently used for screening purposes, the Genes2Me monkeypox test results can be sent to the National Institute of Virology (NIV) for a confirmatory test.

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“At present, it is a screening kit and not a diagnostic confirmatory. It has to be clinically tested with enough samples and we do not have as many positive samples,” Genes2Me founder and CEO Neeraj Gupta told BS, adding, “Now we can manufacture 5 million test kits a week. It can be scaled up to 2 million a day.”

Genes2Me is awaiting approval from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for manufacturing.

Like Molbio and Genes2Me, Chennai-based Trivitron Healthcare has also developed an RT-PCR test kit for monkeypox — a fluorescence-based test — that can differentiate between monkeypox and smallpox in a single-tube reaction format and has a turnaround time of one hour.

“In this four-gene RT-PCR kit, the first target detects the viruses in the wider orthopox group, the second and third targets detect and differentiate the monkeypox and smallpox viruses, respectively, and the fourth one detects the internal control corresponding to human cells to address the assay performance and aid in following its epidemic spread,” Trivitron told BS, explaining the procedure.

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Currently, India has 15 virus research and diagnostic laboratories (VRDLs), including the NIV, all of which fall under the ICMR and are equipped to carry out tests for monkeypox.

However, the Centre has plans to ramp the number up to 40, in addition to having 70 integrated disease surveillance programme laboratories under the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).

Private labs too are keen to jump in, provided they get the requisite permissions from the government, reported BS.