Payyannur (Kannur): A Keralite woman is among the US team that developed the first Rapid Point-of-Care COVID-19 kit that is capable of giving coronavirus test results in an hour. Kasaragod Periya native Chaithra Satheesan was part of the team that invented the kit which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the other day.
The kit was developed by the molecular diagnostics company Cepheid headquartered in Sunnyvale in California of US. They had earlier developed kits for controlling epidemics including H1N1, influenza and Ebola virus.
Chaithra completed her studies in Bio-medical Engineering from UC David Engineering College in California and is working as Diagnostic Consumable Engineer at Cepheid. She is also a recipient of the US President's Award for academic excellence.
Chaithra is the daughter of Sheeja, a bank employee in US, and V Satheesan, an engineer in US. Chaithra is granddaughter of veteran Congress leader P Gangadharan Nair in Periya. Her brother Goutham is graduate student in US.
