Faces of the News: Raul Destura

As a scientist, Raul Destura of the Philippine Genome Center and the University of the Philippines (UP) National Institutes of Health, believes it is his moral responsibility to address the country’s technological needs amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

And he delivered — when he and his team of 15 UP scientists developed a low-cost, early detection kit for the new coronavirus.

Destura said the local detection kit called GenAmplify was developed some two weeks after the whole genome sequence of the virus was released by China to the global scientific community.

The kit, with a turnaround time of less than two hours, will soon be used in hospitals nationwide.

Destura said it might help create an “environment of localized testing” in the country, leading to early detection of COVID-19.

The health department had admitted that a lack of testing kits might have led to the “inadvertent” underreporting of COVID-19 cases in the country, a lapse that GenAmplify hopes to address soon.