Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) has invented an ingenious covid testing method- Tapestry. Tapestry is a technology that enables safe reopening of places of work and education with the help of affordable and frequent testing using a single round, quantitative pooling algorithm with the gold-standard RT-qPCR test.

Tapestry’s patented technology has been taken forward with the help of leading research institutions like National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine (InStem), Tata Memorial Centre, Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) and reputed international research labs.

“Decision makers have been asked to make an impossible choice between health distress and economic distress. Tapestry offers a gradual and safe reopening so that we can step into a new world with more life and less Covid,” says Professor Manoj Gopalkrishnan, inventor of Tapestry and Scientist-Founder of ABPL.

Bengaluru-based startup Algorithmic Biologics Pvt Ltd (ABPL) has launched Tapestry, its first commercial product to scale up covid testing. 

Tapestry’s platform technology works like a compression algorithm for molecular testing, like how JPEG or ZIP compression preserves all the information but in a much smaller file size. Samples from different individuals are mixed into pools according to a code. Each sample is sent to three pools, ensuring testing in triplicate and accurate results. Individual-level results are recovered by looking at the pattern of the pooling results and applying a decoding algorithm.

Tapestry has been cleared by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for commercial use as a non-regulated medical device and registered with the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) as well.