Bhubaneswar: The Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar has achieved yet another milestone with more than 1 lakh COVID-19 sample tests in Odisha. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik conveyed his congratulations to the team who defied all odds to save lives by continuing to test samples day in and day out.
Institute of Life Sciences, an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India, reached the milestone of testing 1,00,000 RT-PCR based samples for COVID 19.
The testing at ILS started in April this year with 44 samples and over the course of time, the testing facility was ramped up to test more than 1000 samples a day. The samples for COVID-19 were provided by the Health and Family welfare department of Govt of Odisha from a many as 26 districts of Odisha.
The entire testing was carried out in the newly commissioned Biosafety Level 3 laboratory with advanced infrastructure and equipment following the best of safety standards.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik congratulated Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) by taking to social media for crossing milestone of one lakh tests and strengthening Odisha’s fight against COVID 19 and appreciated its role for playing a significant part in Odisha’s effort to ramp up tests to contain the spread of the pandemic.
Similarly, Health and Family welfare department also congratulated ILS Bhubaneswar for achieving the feat.
Ajay Parida, Director, ILS mentioned that the testing team of ILS included experienced faculties and research students. He complimented the efforts of the team in augmenting the testing in the state of Odisha and acknowledged the support from the Govt of Odisha as well as Union department of Biotechnology.
In addition to the involvement in testing efforts, ILS is carrying out research studies on COVID-19. ILS has carried out genome sequencing of 225 viral strains, established 17 pure virus cultures, established a biorepository for COVID 19 clinical samples and working on identifying and developing potential drug targets.
ILS Bhubaneswar is one of the 16 centers in the country selected for establishment of Biorepository for COVID 19 clinical samples at Bhubaneswar.
In total, Odisha has conducted over 37.96 lakh sample tests till date.
PNN