CIT Rapid Intelligence
CIT CREATE research students assist local HSE with rapid intelligence on Covid-19 testing
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A team of postgraduate researchers from CIT carried out a rapid-response review on available commercial test kits for Covid-19 for the HSE on 22nd March last. Over a period of just a few hours, the researchers created a database of detailed information on each of the available kits, to provide as much support as possible to the HSE for the important decision-making that needed to be done.
URL: https://www.cit.ie/research
Rapid-response to Ireland’s Covid-19 challenges via intellectual and data-gathering assistance from Cork Institute of Technology’s postgraduate students of biological sciences and their research collaborators: a case study
On 31 December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, China. By the 9th of January of this year, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported the causative agent as being a novel coronavirus (designated Sars-CoV-2). By mid-March 2020 the need for laboratory testing in Ireland for this agent was increasing exponentially and what had earlier begun to be handled by the national virus reference laboratory needed to be introduced in clinical microbiology laboratories throughout the country, urgently. This brought its own challenges – either in-house methods needed to be established or commercial testing kits needed to be procured and verified for their suitability for use in our medical laboratories. This sudden worldwide surge in the need for testing reagents was accompanied by a large diversity of companies racing to produce both testing kits and equipment on which to run them. It should be noted that not every assay or reagent is fit for purpose and medical laboratories always need to verify the performance characteristics and quality of every test method before using it on patient samples. Furthermore, not every assay produced outside of Ireland was going to be readily available to this country.
At 9.57am on 22 March Dr Brigid Lucey, current President of the ACSLM/lecturer at Cork Institute of Technology made an urgent request to Malgorzata (Gosia) Borowska, Maija Kisiste and Sara Arroyo-Moreno, fulltime postgraduate students in the CREATE research facility at Cork Institute of Technology for assistance with a challenge that had come to the ACSLM from the Health Service Executive.
The request was for the volunteers to find as much information as possible relating to any commercial testing kits for Sars-CoV -2/Covid-19 that were available worldwide. Gosia, Maija and Sara had enlisted the help of some of their fellow researchers in CIT - Jennifer O’Leary, Zsuzsanna Boglarka Krkos, Jennifer Jones, Laura Nyhan, Colm Shanahan, Lisa O'Sullivan and Caoimhe Lynch, and their friends Dr Colin Buttimer and Dr Francesca Bottacini in UCC. Their spreadsheet of detailed information on 35 commercial kits was returned to Brigid at 13.09pm on the same day. In the database, the researchers had included information about the manufacturers, any subsidiaries of each company, their distributers, any regulatory support relating to the kits, any extra pertinent information available on each kit and information on the type of equipment needed to run each type of test.
This information was returned via the ACSLM to the HSE to provide as much support as possible for the important decision-making that needed to be done.
This case study encapsulates the willingness of a group of volunteer researchers to put aside everything else in an immediate recognition of the need for a national effort regarding this pandemic and to pool their intellectual resources in an effective and time-managed way.
