Delhi: In a bid to strengthen the fight against third wave of COVID-19, on Thursday, CM Arvind Kejriwal has inaugurated a state-of-the-art genome sequencing facility at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS).
Health Minister Satyendar Jain and ILBS Director Dr Shiv Kumar Sarin accompanied Kejriwal in initiating the launch of Genome Sequencing facility at ILBS.
“The lab has already been set up and the first set of results will come in the next 4-5 days. Yesterday, we launched a similar laboratory at Lok Nayak Hospital, but this is going to be an even more advanced one. I really feel that the people of Delhi will highly benefit from this lab and the facility that it will cater to,” Kejriwal said.
“Until now, we were dependent on National Cooperative Development Corporation and other centres of the Central government for this sequencing. But now, we are independent and will be able to identify the variants on time and take the right actions so as to strategise our plans for any next wave, if at all it comes,” he said.
Laboratory will be able to sequence over 300 samples
The laboratory at ILBS will be able to sequence over 300 samples with the help of the latest machines called NextSeq and MiSeq in a week and provide results in five to seven days.
These facilities will also help in classification of new strains or variants of the coronavirus based on the genomic data, it added.
To announce the news further CM Kejriwal took to tweet and stated, “In view of the preparations for the future, today the second Genome Sequencing facility of the Delhi Government has been started in ILBS. With the help of these labs, the identification and severity of any new variant of coronavirus can be detected. Delhiites will get a lot of benefit from this technology during the pandemic period.”
