Tata Medical and Diagnostics (Tata MD), a new healthcare venture from the Tata group, has launched its Indigenously developed RT-PCR tests for faster and variant-proof results. The company, which has introduced two test kits —Tata MD CHECK XF and Tata MD CHECK RT-PCR Fast – claimed that these kits will significantly boost India’s COVID testing capacity at a time when the country is expecting a multifold increase in demand in the wake of the Omicron driven case surge. 

Tata MD said in a media release that its CHECK XF kit is a 3-Gene RT-PCR test that is RNA extraction free and uses fast amplification protocol combined with a portable and fast qPCR analyzer. The solution, which claims  95 percent sensitivity and 100 percent specificity,  has a processing time of just one hour and can process 30 samples per batch per machine. CHECK RT-PCR Fast is a 3-Gene RT-PCR kit that uses a fast amplification protocol and hence has a processing time of 90 minutes. This can process 90 samples per batch per machine and can be used in existing qPCR instruments to get 100 percent sensitivity and specificity.