COVID-19… is not just a unique combination of alphabets, special characters and numbers. What probably started as a minor flu-like infection has today brought together the whole world in a united fight to save the human race!

Caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, COVID-19 disease is challenging the global healthcare machinery. While doctors and nurses are at the forefront, facing the virus head-on, they are being ably supported by a second-in-command army of healthcare providers of essential services.

Needless to say, diagnostics is one among the most crucial ones, especially with the WHO insisting on ‘test, test and more test’ to combat the deadly virus.

And we are proud to say that as India’s Leading IVD Company, Transasia Bio-Medicals, with its four-decade legacy, continues to meet the needs of doctors and patients for essential diagnostics. Transasia has always lived its chosen mission of ‘providing innovative, reliable and affordable diagnostic solutions to the world’ and at a critical time like this, Transasia has taken the lead to confront an unprecedented challenge…that of lowering the impact COVID-19 on our everyday lives.

ErbaLisa® COVID-19 ELISA kits with CE and FDA approvals

We have developed ErbaLisa® COVID-19 ELISA kits that can detect IgG and IgM antibodies that are critical indicators of the immune response to the infection. These kits are a result of collaborative effort by the company’s scientists from India, the U.S. and the U.K. and were developed in just a month and half’s time for Erba Mannheim, USA. Post receiving the European CE approval, Erba Mannheim also received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s nod for the advanced method of testing antibodies.

After the United States, Italy and Europe, India might soon see the deployment of antibody ELISA kits to know if a person has actually recovered from COVID-19. ErbaLisa® COVID-19 ELISA kits help identify individuals who had the infection, were asymptomatic and recovered without even knowing. They can thus confidently return to work and bring back normalcy to life, while reducing the stress on the frontline warriors.

ErbaLisa® COVID-19 antibody ELISA kits can test 100 samples an hour, with an accuracy rate of 98%. The assay has a high sensitivity and specificity of 98% and results can be obtained in two hours.

We are trying to speed up the production of these kits. Manufacturing in India, will help reduce costs and the kits will be sold in India at an economical rate. With its largest sales and service network across the length and breadth of the country, Transasia is confident that the COVID-19 ErbaLISA kit will reach all the hot-spots and containment zones in the country soon. For this, the company will be liaising with the Government and private healthcare institutes. 

Manufacturing in India

Further, we plan to produce the kits at existing Transasia’s manufacturing locations in Daman and Sikkim, which will further the setting up of a COVID-19 unit making only testing kits for the virus. This plant in Andhra Pradesh’s Med Tech Zone is backed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is awaiting necessary regulatory approvals and on-ground permissions.

Offering Total Solutions for Lab Indicators

Our company’s offerings in IVD are considered essential during these times of crisis. The work we do is critical to the health and well-being of millions of patients who are served by hospitals and laboratories around the world.

Rampant and quick testing for COVID-19 is the need of the hour. Our six-plate ELISA processor, which was recently introduced and is the first-of-its-kind in India, is specially designed for high workload testing to address the challenges of fast diagnosis without compromising on quality. A complete walkaway system, it can perform up to 600 tests/ hr so that more than 5000 patients a day can be tested. It can thus be very useful to run the COVID-19 ELISA panels.

While we all focus on COVID-19, let’s not forget, that 70% of our population is in need of essential interventions for diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, cancer, etc. Hospitasls and laboratories have to focus not just on the suspected COVID cases but cases of patients with other co-morbidities as well.

Our sophisticated, fully automated analyzers in clinical chemistry, hematology, coagulation and ESR help in the evaluation of certain critical parameters such as CBC, haemoglobin, absolute WBC count, neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio, CRP (C-reactive protein), albumin and blood urea nitrogen among others. These parameters are recommended to be included as preliminary investigations for early detection. We continue to offer total solutions for these and several other lab indicators that are critical for the early detection, prognosis and severity assessment of COVID-19.

All our four manufacturing facilities at Mumbai, Daman, Sikkim and Baddi continue to operate, although with limited resources, to ensure that hospitals don’t run short of instruments and reagents at this crucial time.

Ensuring last mile support

Transasia has always taken pride in providing the best after-sales services to its customer base of 40,000 labs in India. While the lockdown made it difficult for people to move around, Transasia’s service engineers were always on the move, providing technical services in record time; often at the cost of personal safety; at the designated COVID hospitals to ensure seamless operations. And they have been ably supported by our team of application support who despite a lockdown in logistic services, ensured no last mile disruption to the availability of spare parts.  

Ongoing engagement with healthcare community

Providing end-to-end services with an emphasis on training will continue to remain most relevant to us, as the need for knowledge and competencies continues to increase. We are proud to engage over 5000 experts from the healthcare fraternity with our ongoing webinars on several aspects of COVID-19 along with a team of national and international pathologists and clinicians of repute. The webinar series highlights the challenges and real-life examples of patients and tertiary care hospitals in India and overseas