Barts Covid-19 Research Appeal – Can You Help?

We have got a major project off the ground in just seven days. The UK and the whole research process was incredible in achieving this. This would normally take a year. The study is on health care workers. It promises to tell us a vast amount of much needed science about the disease. We cannot just work harder to get out of this pandemic. Though important, we cannot ventillate our way to safety. Research is needed. The health care worker study will tell us those critical features about what baseline immunity does – prior virus exposure, the state of your antibodies and cells, who is carrying the disease, what the earliest changes are, what the targets will be for pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis are and how immunity wanes over time. The way we have done this is striving for collaborative science – we have taken enough samples for 25 major groups to get going trying to understand this disease. In six days we have recruited 360 staff at Barts Heart Centre (the largest cardiac centre in Europe), now focused on Covid with an ITU (Intensive Therapy Unit) that has massively expanded to 200 beds. Next week we expand to the Nightingale Hospital with another 600 subjects, and focus also on drug trials there to mitigate this disease.