TOWARDS BETTER HEALTHCARE: Sankara Nethralaya's chairman emeritus S.S. Badrinath greets P. Kulshrestha, team regional manager (southern region) of SAIL/Central Marketing Organisation, at the inauguration of the laboratory in Chennai on Monday.  1; PHOTO: R. SHIVAJI RAO

CHENNAI: A molecular microbiology research laboratory was inaugurated on Monday at Sankara Nethralaya on College Road.

The new facility is the first in the country to standardise and apply molecular biological methods for detection of bacterial and fungal genomes from body fluids of patients with infectious diseases, according to hospital authorities.

With more people reporting various infectious diseases, it had become necessary to diagnose the infections quickly.

Reduced diagnosis time

The new facility reduced diagnosis time from days to merely a few hours and helped to institute early specific therapy, authorities said.

Nethralaya's in-house advanced detection techniques are used by clinicians in 100 hospitals/clinics in and around Chennai to find infectious agents in clinical specimens.

The Vision Research Foundation Referral Laboratory's services are used for this purpose.

The laboratory also caters to ophthalmologists in five other Indian States.

Among other advanced research work, the laboratory will help in identifying species and strain variations, develop DNA sequencing techniques for non-cultivable bacteria and newer bacterial pathogens and establish rapid methods for detection of bacterial growth and drug resistance.

Rs.25 lakh donation

Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), as part of its corporate social responsibility initiatives, has donated Rs.25 lakh to set up the laboratory.

The laboratory would help to develop Nethralaya's academic, research and diagnostics pursuits in fields such as mycobacteriology, virology, mycology, parasitology and ocular immunology.

Team regional manager (southern region) of SAIL/Central Marketing Organisation P. Kulshrestha praised Sankara Nethralaya's work. His company's CSR activities in south India included distributing hearing aids and furniture to a village school near Hyderabad. It had also planned to adopt villages as it had done in the north, he said.

Senior hospital officials, including Lingam Gopal, chairman elect, participated.

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