DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE

The past few years have been challenging, as the world reeled under the havoc wreaked by the COVID pandemic. I am proud to state that team CSIR-IMTECH was at the forefront of the national efforts towards mitigation of COVID-19. CSIR-IMTECH provided the infrastructure and manpower for RT-qPCR based COVID-19 testing early on in the pandemic, making judicious use of its state-of-the-art BSL3 and BSL2 laboratories and was recognized by ICMR as a nodal center for COVID-19 testing. In addition to catering to the testing of COVID samples sent to us by the health officials of the Tricity, Haryana, Punjab and Uttarakhand, IMTECH scientists also provided training in COVID-19 RT-PCR testing to multiple National and Regional Laboratories. Besides testing clinical samples, CSIR-IMTECH scientists also optimized protocols for testing sewage samples and conducted air sampling to monitor aerosol transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as part of a multidisciplinary team along with other CSIR Laboratories. Several of our scientists worked in a mission mode and embarked upon several COVID-19 related projects such as biosensor development for COVID-19 diagnosis, development of COVID-19 vaccine immunogens, multi-centric genome surveillance, stabilized perfusion spike protein based vaccine design and others.