Minal Dakhave Bhosale, 31, Biotechnologist

The face of India’s first homegrown commercial Covid-19 PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) kit, Minal Dakhave Bhosale is part of a young team of 11 researchers at Mylab Discovery Solutions, a Pune-based molecular diagnostics company, that saw opportunity in the early release, in January, of WHO’s Berlin protocol for the real-time kits. Soon, Bhosale was leading efforts at the company to develop a kit in-house. The team had developed and tested primers and probes for the kit by early March and ICMR sped up approvals to get the first shipment of 20,000 kits out in the market by the end of the month. This wasn’t the first of firsts for Bhosale and her team. In April 2019, Mylab had become the first company in Asia to get approval for nucleic acid tests for screening blood donations to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted infections. Mylab has since ramped up Covid-19 kit capacity to 2 lakh a day.

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