- Wednesday, April 16, 2025
By: indiaweekly.biz Staff
Virologist Minal Dakhave Bhosale of Maharashtra led from the front to create India’s first coronavirus testing kit while she was in the final stage of her pregnancy.
Bhosale’s efforts made history, with her team delivering the testing kit in a record time of six weeks.
The virologist, who headed a research team at a Pune lab, gave birth to a baby girl just a day after submitting the kit to the authorities for evaluation.
“It was like giving birth to two babies,” Bhosale told PTI.
She added that both the journeys – that happened in parallel – were not without challenges.
“There were complications in the pregnancy while work on the test kit was on. The baby was delivered through cesarean,” she said.
Bhosale said she felt that it was the right time to serve the people to help them in combating the coronavirus threat.
“I had been working for five years in this field and if I don’t work in emergency situations when my services are needed the most, then what is the use?” she said.
Though Bhosale was not able to visit the office due to pregnancy, she was guiding a team of 10 persons working on the project at MyLab Discovery in Pune.
The strong bonds forged with team members over the years and their support made it possible, she said.
Company’s co-founder Shrikant Patole credited Bhosale for the project’s success. He added that, like drugs, test kits also go through a lot of quality checks to improve precision.
The COVID-19 testing kit delivered by Bhosale’s team will reduce the time taken for delivering a result to 2.5 hours from the prevalent practice of eight hours.
A pioneering approach to testing without compromising on the results was adopted, Bhosale said.
The MyLab test kit will cost Rs 1,200, a quarter of Rs 4,500 per kit that the government had been spending on testing so far.
“I’m happy that I could do something for the country,” Bhosale said.
By last weekend, only 27,000 of the 1.3 billion people had been tested for the virus in the country.
Experts said high-scale testing was essential to ensure early diagnosis of Covid-19, and lower down the fatalities.
The company was confident of ramping up the capacity at its plant in Lonavala to deliver 100,000 kits a week, Patole said.
He said the authorities were helping the company, including giving priority for shipping of the raw materials.
