Jameel sheikh, a Pakistani software engineer has developed the five-minute COVID’19 testing kit. He was a resident of Sindh’s Larkana district who graduated from the NED university of Karachi and moved to the US according to the report in the local newspapers.

He was among the software engineers who assisted his team at Abbot company in the creation of the portable testing kit, which could detect the virus in as little as five minutes. The test will run on the company’s ID NOW™ platform, providing rapid results in a wide range of healthcare settings such as physicians’ offices, urgent care clinics and hospital emergency departments.

The ID NOW platform is small, lightweight (6.6 pounds) and portable (the size of a small toaster), and uses molecular technology, which is valued by clinicians and the scientific community for its high degree of accuracy. ID NOW is already the most widely available molecular point-of-care testing platform in the U.S. today.

“The COVID-19 pandemic will be fought on multiple fronts, and a portable molecular test that offers results in minutes adds to the broad range of diagnostic solutions needed to combat this virus,” said Robert B. Ford, president and chief operating officer, Abbott. “With rapid testing on ID NOW, healthcare providers can perform molecular point-of-care testing outside the traditional four walls of a hospital in outbreak hotspots.”

FDA (US food and drug administration) has also given its emergency authorization to make these kits available as soon as possible to the health care providers.

Abbott will be making COVID-19 tests available next week and expects to ramp up manufacturing to deliver 50,000 tests per day. Furthermore, Abbott expects to produce five million test per month.