LIVE BLOG: R&D response to COVID-19 pandemic (Archived)

The design of a continuous positive airway pressure device that can help COVID-19 patients with breathing difficulties when an oxygen mask alone is insufficient has been made available by University College London. This type of device is more usually provided to control sleep apnea, a condition where people have pauses in breathing while asleep. Engineers at UCL and the Mercedes Formula One team designed the device in a rapid turnaround project, with the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Agency giving its approval last week. All details of the design, materials used and how to fabricate the device are available for download here: covid19research.uclb.com/product/ucl-cpap. A key aim of the project was to design a device that is simple to manufacture.

The UK innovation agency has launched a £20 million call for ideas that will increase resilience and deal with problems arising as a result of the current crisis, in areas such as  delivery services, community support, food manufacturing, retail, haulage, and supporting people stuck at home. The lead applicant must be a UK registered business. It must be possible to carry out the research within the working restrictions imposed by COVID-19. Application deadline: 17 April.

A COVID-19 Sounds App has been developed by Cecilia Mascolo, professor of mobile systems at Cambridge University, to collect and analyse the speech patterns, breathing and coughs of users, providing inputs for development of a COVID-19 diagnostic. "Having spoken to doctors, one of the most common things they have noticed about patients with the virus is the way they catch their breath when they’re speaking, as well as a dry cough, and the intervals of their breathing patterns," said Mascolo. "There are very few large datasets of respiratory sounds, so to make better algorithms that could be used for early detection, we need as many samples from as many participants as we can get.” The research is partly funded by the European Research Council through Project EAR, an audio-based health diagnostics project, with Mascolo receiving a €2.5 million European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2019.

The National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon announced it is allocating LBP300 million (€183,000) for COVID-19 research in diagnostic tools, use of big data analytics and robotic devices. Projects should take a maximum of six months to complete, with the aim of providing practical and quick ways to reduce suffering and limit the effects of the epidemic on public health and society. Application deadline: 22 April.

The French National Agency for Research on HIV/AIDS launched a call for COVID-19 research projects in low and middle income countries in Africa, South America and Asia. Applicants must have a research team based in France and another team based in a country with a fragile healthcare system which is likely to find it difficult to respond to the pandemic. ANRS says control measures used to date in Europe may be difficult to apply in these settings. There is total budget of €4 million for the fast track call, with ANRS  inviting project leaders to seek co-financing for their research. Application deadline: 13 April.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium of companies including IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, academic institutions and federal agencies, is making members’ computers available for research in bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modelling projects requiring large amounts of processing capacity, to increase understanding of COVID-19 and inform strategies to address it. Research projects given access to date include a virtual high throughput in silico screen to find drug candidates, a molecular level simulation of the coronavirus entering a human host cell, and sequencing the genomes of patients who have suffered the worst effects of the infection to see if there is a genetic signature to the predict which future patients are most likely to need intensive care. In addition to selecting which research to back, the consortium, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the US Department of Energy and IBM, will identify which of their members has the most appropriate computing resource for each project.

In an effort to provide clear and comparable health systems information to policymakers struggling to control the coronavirus, the World Health Organization and the European Commission have set up the COVID-19 Health Systems Response Monitor, to pull together and organise information on public health initiatives in Europe, and to compare health responses between countries. Countries are calling for clear and comparable health systems evidence to inform policies and help strengthen their capacity to respond to this unprecedented crisis, said Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe. “This tool is a breakthrough resource for health systems decision-makers tackling the pandemic,” he said.

Emergency policies passed in response to the coronavirus pandemic have the potential to create privacy and data protection legal issues. Vrije Universiteit of Brussel (VUB) has set up an initiatives and policy tracker, giving an overview of how countries around the world are adapting laws on privacy in times of crisis. The tracker will also help researchers at VUB to provide humanitarian organisations with advice on how to protect personal data of affected individuals and of their own staff.

The Japanese government announced it is making the emergency influenza treatment Avigan (favipiravir) available to 30 countries which have requested supplies to treat COVID-19. This follows reports from China that the antiviral drug had reduced the length of time patients with the infection needed to stay in hospital.

In 2014 – 2016 Avigan was tested in a 111 patient clinical trial in treating another coronavirus infection, Ebola, in epidemic in West Africa. The study, which was jointly funded by the EU Horizon 2020 R&D programme and the French government, failed to show a positive effect.

Avigan was approved in 2014, for use only when there is an outbreak of a novel or re-emerging flu infection which cannot be treated with other antivirals drugs. As such, it is held in reserve and the Japanese government decides when it should be used. Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary said the Japanese government has received numerous requests through diplomatic channels for access to Avigan. The drug’s manufacturer Fujifilm announced last week that it is increasing production and that it is starting a phase III clinical trial in Japan. The government announcement is at 13:30 in this video.

The European Commission announced the EUvsVirus Hackathon will take place on 24 – 26 April, to come up with ideas for expediting the response to COVID-19. The commission says this will complement similar events taking place at a global and member state level. There will be twenty challenges, including a search for ways to speed up and scale up production of medical supplies, that can be quickly developed and deployed across the EU single market.