Agilent Technologies announced the contribution of Agilent AriaMx Real-Time qPCR instruments to five research hospitals in India to support their COVID-19 initiatives and help them serve the community at large. As part of this effort, Agilent India partnered with Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, Tata Medical Center Kolkata, Gujarat Technological University (GTU), Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology Delhi (CSIR-IGIB), and Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, Bengaluru.

“It’s an honour for Agilent to partner with these eminent institutes and hospitals in their pursuit of fostering innovation, supporting scientific development and furthering research initiatives in these trying times,” said, Bharat Bhardwaj, Country GM, Agilent India.

Dr Mohammed Faruq, Principal Scientist, CSIR-IGIB, “We thank Agilent and their entire team for extending their support in furthering our COVID-19 research initiatives at IGIB. Since the onset of the pandemic in India, the team at IGIB has been offering various research-based genome sequencing services to numerous government health centres and academia.” 

Dr Faruq further added, “Currently, IGIB is supporting the Government of India in RT-PCR tests daily. This instrument from Agilent will make our setup more efficient and help increase the number of tests done every day. We also hope that it would prove its utility in various research exercises which IGIB is undertaking that includes high throughput molecular surveillance, vaccine breakthrough genome sequencing and reinfections sequencing of SARS-CoV-2.”