Research looking at why coronavirus affects people differently has been featured on Channel 4 News. Most current research into coronavirus focusses only on patients with severe disease in hospital. It is however important to study people with milder disease as well, in order to understand why some people have only minor symptoms whilst for others it is fatal.
The study by UCL researchers who are supported by the BRC, in collaboration with Barts Health NHS Trust and QMUL, involves the weekly collection of blood, saliva and other biological samples from hospital health care workers over 16 weeks. This will ensure that participants are studied before, during and after infection and help researchers to identify genetic and immunological risk predictors.
Researchers running the Barts COVIDsortium Healthcare Worker Bioresource study – including Professor James Moon and Dr Charlotte Manisty who is also a consultant cardiologist at UCLH, alongside Professor Mahdad Noursadeghi, Professor of Infectious Diseases at UCL – recruited their first 400 healthcare workers in the first 7 working days and now aim to recruit 1000 in total.
So far they have collected thousands of blood samples and hundreds of nasal swabs. This will generate a bioresource with hundreds of thousands of samples available for research groups across the UK to use to address a range of questions around the virus and host immunity.
Watch the Channel 4 video here.
