Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) Director General Shekhar Mande on Thursday commended the contributions of various labs across the country in the fight against COVID. He said that these contributions have been “diverse in setting up COVID surveillance strategies, affordable diagnostics, drugs and therapeutics development, hospital-assistive device development, and building supply chain and logistics”.
Addressing the staff and students of the three CSIR institutes here – National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), he congratulated their contributions and mentioned the praise CSIR-IICT received from policy-makers for developing an adjuvant for Covaxin, making it a totally indigenously-built effective vaccine.
He specifically mentioned how CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratory used its expertise of building next generation flights to build ventilators during the pandemic. They collaborated with CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology to understand how lungs and ventilators function.
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“Together, they built the first non-invasive ventilator in record time and is now widely used. No one group, one individual can take credit for contributions in fighting COVID as the entire credit goes to CSIR as an organisation,” remarked Dr. Mande and pointed out that the institutional leadership went out of the way to ensure labs functioned every single day during this fight.
CSIR has been “uniquely placed” in terms of its mandate spanning from being strategic with pre-decided end points to others that perform blue-sky research and create quality human resources for future. Sandwiched between the two, it has enabled the organisation, to address fundamental unsolved questions as well as work tangibly towards societal good and create solutions to the pressing challenges of today.
“This helps in building viable bridges with the otherwise risk-averse industry,” he added. Directors of CSIR-CCMB Vinay K. Nandicoori, CSIR-IICT S. Chandrasekhar and CSIR-NGRI V.M. Tiwari were present.
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