We have awarded a grant of £25,000 to the Barts Covid-19 Research Appeal. Our donation will contribute towards the creation and preliminary analysis of a biorepository of data and blood samples. This resource will enable research into numerous outstanding questions relating to the acquisition and transmission of Covid-19.
The team responsible for the project is the Barts Covid-19 Research Consortium, made up of doctors and researchers from Barts Health, University College London, and Queen Mary University London. They are approaching Covid research from a different angle to many other research groups, focusing on gathering blood samples and health data from frontline healthcare workers rather than patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19. This will allow them to compare samples from each person before, during and after their exposure to Covid-19, and to investigate the disease in people who develop only mild symptoms or are asymptomatic.
Our grant will go towards the extension of the project, as it grows from 400 to 1,000 staff samples, working at St Bart’s, the Nightingale, and other London hospitals. The library of over 200,000 samples will be shared with leading research groups across the UK studying various aspects of the disease response including vaccination, testing, and understanding the role of genetics.
For more information on the appeal, click here.