UoH, Mumbai firm secure patent for rapid molecular testing technology | Hyderabad News

Hyderabad: The University of Hyderabad (UoH) and Mumbai-based miBiome Therapeutics LLP have been granted a patent for a technology that could make molecular testing faster, more efficient and cost-effective.The patent, titled “Method of Pooling Multiple Reverse Indexed DNA/RNA Samples and Adding Single Indexed Forward Primer and Application Thereof”, has been granted to Sreenivasulu Kurukuti, professor in the Department of Animal Biology, School of Life Sciences, UoH, and Dr Gautam Das of miBiome Therapeutics.The invention emerged from a collaborative research initiative during the Covid-19 pandemic to develop technologies that could handle large numbers of samples for molecular testing.The patented method uses next-generation sequencing (NGS) to process multiple DNA/RNA samples together. Each sample is tagged with a unique molecular barcode, allowing researchers to pool samples for testing while still identifying each one individually.By reusing these tags across different groups of samples, the method can theoretically distinguish samples from 92,160 individuals (96 × 960). The approach could potentially be scaled up to handle millions of samples.