Spicehealth, Spicejet’s healthcare arm, has tied-up with CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) to set up a portable testing laboratory for genome sequencing at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport for all positive samples from international travellers.
CSIR-IGIB is a constituent member of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) recently announced by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Under this program, all positive samples from international travellers arriving at Delhi’s IGI airport would be sequenced at the airport sequencing laboratory, to ensure early action in containing new mutant variants that have increased transmissibility.
Sequencing at the airport is expected to significantly minimise the time to necessary action. CSIR’s experience using portable sequencers suggests that it is possible to identify variants within 48 hours of a person arriving in India and testing positive.
If the samples are shipped to regional sequencing labs and then sequenced with the next batch, such time would be approximately one week or more. Sequencing at the airport could thus save as much as five days of potential transmission, reducing the spread of the imported variant strains.
