COVID-19 Special: Feluda- our very own sleuth

4 min readJun 6, 2020

“I would keep myself updated and share recent findings on the novel coronavirus with my peers when the pandemic first started. I wasn’t initially a part of the core team but later my supervisor subtly asked if I would be interested. I jumped at the opportunity. Who would miss a chance like that?

It was our supervisor’s idea to use CRISPR/Cas9 instead of the conventional RT-PCR as a diagnostic tool for COVID-19. We didn’t face much problems in terms of reagents and the setup because our laboratory was already equipped with all the tools; we have been extensively working on genome editing of sickle cell anemia by CRISPR/Cas9. Our goal was to develop a testing kit that was fast, cost effective and required lesser reagents.

The initial optimization was obviously time consuming. We had to work day in and day out. I remember we once worked for 48 hours at a stretch with hardly any break! Although there was a lot of excitement and adrenaline rush, it did get excessively tiring too. But in the end our hard work paid off and we came out with a testing kit which could diagnose COVID-19 in an hour.

The kit is called FELUDA after the famous Bengali detective. Co-incidentally, the Cas9 protein which we have used in the kit comes from a bacterium with the initial F. It simply clicked for us.

The strip on the left signifies a COVID-19 positive sample while the one on the right signifies a negative one — The left strip is from a COVID-19 positive sample while the right is from a negative one

This is a cartoon made by Manoj in the beginning of this pandemic thinking whether the team could produce some viral therapy for SARS-COV2 using CRISPR/Cas9. The technique is being worked upon by many laboratories around the globe at present.

Currently the process of scaling up and marketing it for the general public is being done by our commercial partners. We hope it will be ready to use soon.

Throughout these 2–3 months my family has been very supportive, particularly my mother. I was surprised by her reaction because I thought she would be the first one to panic. When I told her I would be working on the virus instead of going home during the lockdown, she was not at all upset. Instead she asked me questions about my work and how we could raise awareness in society. I have had prior training in explaining science to common people in the simplest way possible, so it was easy to convey my work to her. She now goes and explains it to the rest of the community back at my native place and can tackle questions on the coronavirus better than me! I am more proud of her than she is of me and now I can’t wait to go back home.

We have just started training a bigger team for the task and hopefully in a couple of weeks, I will finally be able to take a break.”

-Manoj Kumar, PhD in Genome Engineering, Institute of Genomic and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB), New Delhi

Editor’s note: The FELUDA testing kit has been made by a team of 5 people: Mohd. Azhar, Rhythm Phutela, Riya Rauthan, Asgar Hussain and Manoj Kumar himself. Dipanjali Sinha and Sundaram Acharya contributed in developing the final form of the FELUDA kit. This team was mentored by senior scientists Dr. Souvik Maiti and Dr. Debojyoti Chakraborty.