New funding to help understand how Covid-19 affects the most vulnerable

Dr Kenneth Baillie, Academic Consultant in Critical Care Medicine, University of Edinburgh has secured funding from the Medical Research Council to work in partnership with Professor Peter Openshaw from Imperial College London and Professor Calum Semple from the University of Liverpool.

The partnership has received nearly £5 million to tackle the coronavirus pandemic from the government’s rapid response call. The investment will kickstart a new project that seeks to increase our understanding of Covid-19 and its impact on the body.

The team will collect samples and data from 1,300 Covid-19 patients in the UK. The results will provide real-time information about the virus and could help to control the outbreak and improve treatment for patients.

Specifically, researchers will use the data to discover who in the population is at higher risk of severe illness, what is the best way to diagnose the disease and what happens in patients’ immune systems to help or harm them when they contract Covid-19.

They will also monitor the effects of drugs used in patients, calculate how long people are infectious, investigate if people are infected with other viruses – such as flu – at the same time.

The MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR) will also play a role in this project, undertaking whole genome sequence of the virus from samples. Dr Antonia Ho from CVR will coordinate recruitment of Scottish patients.

The team has been part of the International Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Consortium (ISARIC) for eight years and includes co-investigators from six UK universities and Public Health England.

Covid-19 is completely new disease and presents so many unanswered questions. Through analysis of samples from 1,300 people, we can increase our understanding of how Covid-19 makes some people desperately sick. This in turn will help inform how we can best treat the disease.

Dr Kenneth Baillie 

Baillie lab, Roslin Institute.