Cláudio M. Soares - Synopsis

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The ITQB NOVA COVID-19 TASK FORCE - Research and Innovation

COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, appeared at the end 2019 and rapidly spread around the World. The emergency of this situation prompted many changes in our society, including lockdowns, that, among many perturbations, affected academic institutions. These respond rapidly moving classes online, which, in the case of ITQB NOVA, only took a week after the issue of the March 2020 lockdown. Lectures and even some practicals (computational) moved online and we did the best we could. Helping the health system became also a priority and, besides providing needed reagents that we had in stock, we started making PCR tests at ITQB NOVA in June 2020, in a partnership with the Oeiras Municipality, involving dozens of volunteers who performed many thousands of tests. This showed the usefulness of academic institutions in the life sciences area in facing the unexpected and the unknown, and the importance of background knowledge and practice.

Concomitant with this, we decided to do research on COVID-19, forming the ITQB NOVA COVID 19 scientific task force, whose first meeting took place in March 31st 2020. There was only one lab working on viral infection, but several dozen researchers voluntarily joined the efforts and started generously working on different aspects of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. We allocated start-up funds for this research and some labs were able to secure external funds to continue it.  These efforts included simulation of key proteins, methods for production of enzymes used in diagnostic tests, production of key virus proteins and human proteins in alternative hosts (bacteria, yeast and plants), designing and production of alternative biopharmaceuticals, structural characterization of key proteins, designing and testing of alternative vaccines, studying small molecule inhibitors as potential drugs and developing of alternative and cheap test for diagnostic. These efforts and their scientific and technological outputs will be summarised in this presentation.