Riding The Tide
The US endorsement of Pakistan's position on Kashmir bolsters Musharraf's fortunes even as anti-American outrage gathers steam.

Powell And Patience
President Bush's invitation to Vajpayee for a one-on-one in Washington next month makes up for the disappointment in New Delhi in the wake of Colin Powell's visit.

Autumn Of Turmoil
The Northern Alliance waits and watches the US moves in anticipation of a post-US-attack power struggle with the Taliban.
A look at the mood and the ground realities in Kabul.

HEALTH: DIAGNOSTIC KITS

India's New Detectives

Inexpensive and reliable, indigenous test kits are good news not just for medicine but business too

By Supriya Bezbaruah

	DROP OF CLUES: A pink dot or a black band make the difference between life and death

Asplash of pink. That's all it took to shatter 10-year-old Abhay Gupta's life. Two years ago, Delhi-based Abhay was diagnosed with hepatitis B-the pink that showed in a laboratory test indicated the potentially fatal virus infection.

Abhay promptly lapsed into a whirl of anxiety and confusion. Taunted by friends, his depression began to affect his studies. But when the supposedly ailing child showed no symptoms, his suspicious doctor ordered a retest. It was negative. The previous test had been a false alarm, but Abhay's nightmare persists.

For the magnitude of trauma that wrong diagnoses can unleash and for a country condemned with the world's largest diseased populace, India has been surprisingly bereft of a healthy stock of diagnostic kits. Relying heavily on expensive imported kits, people have had to contend with unreliable prognoses primarily because these kits are not suited to hot and dusty Indian conditions. Now, however, things are changing. A new range of India-specific diagnostic kits developed by Indian companies through indigenous research promise reliable results at a cheaper price. Last year, nine technological procedures were transferred from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT)-funded laboratories to Indian industries to be developed. Another 12 are on the way.

"The business potential is enormous for India," says Purnima Sharma, managing director, Biotechnology Consortium India Limited (BCIL). This is because the industry is largely import driven and companies either market finished products or import reagents in bulk and repackage them here. The present Indian market is estimated at Rs 500 crore and is growing at a rate of 25-30 per cent every year, according to a BCIL study.

Besides the business, it is the medicinal benefits that promise to be immense. In a hospital, overworked doctors with minimal equipment often have seconds to find out what ailment the patient suffers from. "The patient provides only one sample and there is no room for errors," says V.K. Vinayak, dynamic adviser, medical biotechnology, DBT. Equally important is the purity of blood available in blood banks, where each sample has to be checked for a range of infections like HIV, hepatitis and malaria.

Diseases, like people, may be the same the world over but have distinctive faces in different parts of the globe. To detect them beyond doubt one needs to recognise their local characteristics. European and American kits undergo stringent quality tests but could occasionally miss out on a particularly desi version of a bacterium or virus. Which is why indigenously designed kits are vital. AIDS, for instance, is a global disease, but hiv-1, the culprit in most cases, has various subtypes in several countries. In India, 95 per cent of HIV cases are of the hiv-1C type, whereas hiv-1A and B are predominant in western countries.

The range is even wider in hepatitis. "Hepatitis C has as many as 11 genotypes. In India, C-1 is universal while there are a significant number of C-2 and C-3 cases," points out B.V. Ravi Kumar, former Astra-Zeneca scientist who made his fortune with an Indian version of the HIV kit in 1997 and now heads the Bangalore-based XCyton Diagnostics Limited. In May this year, his company launched a hepatitis C test kit that incorporates key pieces from all the three Indian versions of the virus which will be distributed to blood banks all across the country. Similarly, Delhi-based J. Mitra & Sons brought out a specific hiv-1C confirmatory kit earlier this year, while the Ahmedabad-based Cadila Health Products introduced a two-minute preliminary HIV test kit. Hepatitis A kits are expected to be launched by Bharat Biotech by December. Cadila Zydus is also close to launching a diagnostic kit for Japanese encephalitis (JE) for which there was no reliable test till now. To outsmart the antibiotic-resistant desi versions of tuberculosis, Delhi-based doctor-turned-entrepreneur Nimrat Bawa's team at Auroprobe Labs has fine-tuned a sensitive technique called polymerase chain reaction.

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