Bhubaneswar: The city-based Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) has successfully established in-vitro culture of coronavirus from the samples of patients using Vero cells (host cells for growing viruses). This was informed by the director of the institute Ajay Parida said there on Saturday.
According to Ajay Parida, a team of ILS consisting scientists Soma Chattopadhyay and Gulam H Syed have established the virus’ cultures.
Parida said that it is pure virus culture and the team has cultured 17 different isolates of the virus.
The ISL-Bhubaneswar said that this culture will help in developing drug for COVID-19. Drug can be tested against these virus cultures.
It is a significant development for the ISL as only three other laboratories from India namely the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad and RMRC, Dibrugarh have reported establishing virus cultures till now.
Parida said this will be a useful resource for the country in the fight against COVID-19. “It will be helpful for future preparedness. These viral cultures will help academicians as well as industry for testing and validating various anti-viral products contributing to diagnostic, cure and management of COVID-19 pandemic,” he added.
It is worthwhile to mention here that a laboratory has been set up by the national institute for testing of the Coronavirus where around 45,000 samples have been tested since April this year.
Along with 15 other institutions of the country, the ILS Bhubaneswar has been selected for setting up a bio-repository of clinical samples for furthering research and development efforts for coronavirus.
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