European initiatives at a glance
- CEITEC in Brno reported that their sequencing core is being used to process clinical samples and volunteers have made 36,127 face shields.
- VIB in Belgium is supporting their virology group who are preparing therapeutic antibodies and also volunteer researchers are testing >3K patient samples per day.
- The Univ. of York technology facility has loaned qPCR equipment to the NHS.
- EBI-EMBL is working to make all COVID structure data publicly available through EMPIR to facilitate crowd- based data processing.
- Alexandria.Works, a Belgian IT company, has developed a free COVID research database with >47K papers curated by the Allen Institute https://alexandria.works/covid-19-open-research-dataset/
- 14 core facilities of the Institut Pasteur (Paris, France) are actively involved in a variety of Covid-19 related research projects.
- EPFL Switzerland are producing mammalian cells and purifying coronavirus protein to assist in developing serological assays
- The structural biology core facility at CEITEC is providing priority free access to its services for COVID 19 studies https://www.ciisb.org//
- Staff of core facilities at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Lisbon are working on open source low cost ventilators www.air4all.pt.
- As one of the few imaging cores still operating The University of Gothenburg is offering rapid access to it’s instrumentation to COVID researchers. Contact Julia Fernandez-Rodriguez for details.
- CNIO – Spanish National Cancer Research Center: donated 3 PCR machines to the La Paz and Gregorio Marañon Hospitals in Madrid to increased their diagnostics capabilities
- CINO is also using their Mouse Genome Editing Core Unit to generate preclinical mouse models to be used for testing drugs against SARS-Cov-2
- CNIC – Spanish National Cardiovascular Center: the genomics unit are performing PCR diagnostics for Covid19 patients and the proteomics unit is researching the interaction between SARS-Cov-2 and its host.
And more from:
- Nuno Moreno and Hamilton Robotics and ABRF Association in the CTLS Special Newsletter Covid-19
- Core Facility Ramp-Up Information https://abrf.org/sites/default/files/temp/abrf_core_facility_ramp-up_information_v3.1.pdf