PESHAWAR: Public Health Reference Laboratory (PHRL) has been ready to install a sequencer to ensure early detection of all coronavirus variants.
Dr Yasar Yousafzai, Director, PHRL, Khyber Medical University, said they planned their first attempt in September. He said further that sequencer could easily detect and characterise all the increasingly transmissible variants along with the sub-mutations of Delta at the earliest.
Dr Yasar said that John Hopkin`s University, Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, National Institute of Health (NIH), Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) and World Health Organization (WHO) were providing technical assistance to them for the sequencer.
The provincial government bought the Sanger Sequencer at Rs29 million with a complete set of machines and reagents. He added that a sample for targeted sequencing would cost Rs6,000, but the patients would get the facility free of charge.
