A Ph.D. student of the Indian Institute of Science, representing India, has been awarded the third prize in the ‘Breakthrough of the Year Emerging Talents’ category at the Falling Walls Lab and Science Summit held in Berlin recently.
Ayushi Chauhan of the Toley Lab, Chemical Engineering Department, who won the award, is working on developing a minimally instrumented pocket-size assay for rapid and decentralised detection of drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB).
Ms. Chauhan is developing this along with Bhushan J. Toley, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering Department, and they said that this tool might provide the much-needed breakthrough in the field of TB diagnostics.
Movement against TB
Ms. Chauhan pointed out that two months back, President Droupadi Murmu launched a nationwide movement to eradicate TB from the country by 2025, five years before the UN’s target of a TB free world.
“As India accounts for the highest number of TB and DR-TB cases in the world with 70% of the country’s population residing in rural areas, eradicating the disease using the current centralised equipment is tough. This new device, if it stands the test of time, can be a promising tool for detecting TB and DR-TB,” Ms. Chauhan said.
“While the entire infrastructure required to detect DR-TB could be fit into a small briefcase using our methods, the detection device is only pocket-sized. The detection device is similar to the home pregnancy test or rapid antigen tests used for COVID detection,” Prof. Toley said. He added that the method is currently in the development stage.
Awaiting clearance
“Analytically, the performance looks good, and we are currently waiting to obtain the human ethical clearance for conducting clinical validation,” he added.
Falling Walls Lab and Science Summit is held annually in November to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This year, Falling Walls Lab was conducted in 54 different countries and 78 national lab winners from these countries were invited to Berlin to represent their country.
