Cuba with new molecular biology laboratory in center of the country

SANCTI SPIRITUS, Cuba, May 4 (ACN) Although in the start-up stage, the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biology, in this city, is already carrying out diagnostic tests by PCR in real time to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

This facility, one of the last to be set up in Cuba to counteract the current world pandemic, is currently working under the supervision of specialized personnel from the Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK) in Havana, which will certify it so that the institution can continue working.

Dr. Laydi Cabrera Martinez, director of the laboratory, told the Cuban News Agency that 92 samples were processed on Monday, a figure that will be maintained today as part of the start-up of the center, built next to the University of Medical Sciences of Sancti Spiritus.

For his part, Livan Rodriguez Lemas, director of the Provincial Center of Electromedicine, stated that his group, made up of 86 workers, recovered vertical autoclaves for sterilization, centrifuges and a magnetic stirrer; a task that took less than a month of work so that the laboratory could be certified, as it was done, and start its activity.

The new institution employs 43 workers, including five physicians, seven graduates in Microbiology or Clinical Bioanalysis and 15 students of the same specialty, who will conclude their fifth year of study in this center.

In March 2020, when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Cuba, only PCR tests were performed at the IPK; today the country has 27 molecular biology laboratories, 11 of them in health institutions in Havana, two in Mayabeque and the same number on the Isle of Youth (one on Cayo Largo del Sur), and one per territory in the other provinces.

According to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, the country has so far accumulated 3,720,729 samples analyzed and 110,644 have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.