New indigenous AIDS diagnostic kit to be cheaper, promises early detection

Indian scientists have developed a third–generation diagnostics kit, which can pick up early signals of both HIV–1 and HIV–2 infections within six weeks.

The first and second generation Enzyme–Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA) kits, currently available in the market, is a fundamental tool of clinical immunology, and is used as an initial screen for HIV detection. However, they take six and three months respectively.

According to the scientists at Cadila Pharmaceuticals, the new kits have a slightly better chance of identifying the virus type besides helping detect HIV positive patients at the earliest.

The kit has been named ELIK HIV–1 and 2.

The company intends to sell it to the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) and blood banks for bulk use.

"We believe it is one of the most sensitive ELISA kits for detection of anti–HIV antibodies even at an early stage of the infection. Use of this sensitive and specific kit will help in containing the spread of the disease," Dr. P.K. Ghosh, head of Cadila's biotechnology division and a former advisor to the Department of Biotechnology in the central government, said.

Early diagnosis of the infection is thus of utmost importance in this scenario for counseling, prevention of spread and ensuring safety of blood obtained from the donors, he said, adding that the kit has 99.63 percent sensitivity and 99.88 percent specificity.

The kit's performance was tested in more than 2100 samples, the Cadila team has reported in the journal, Current Science.

Better performance has been attributed to the design, production and purification of a unique protein, which has been used as the agent to identify the bio–chemicals found in HIV positive patients' blood within the six weeks.

While the existing first and second generation kits cannot detect the antibodies against p24 antigen of the core protein of HIV, there are imported kits capable of doing the same.

But being an indigenous product, Cadila diagnostic will be cheaper when procured in bulk.