We asked the CSIC staff how they are dealing with the exceptional situation by COVID-19. José Luis García, Director of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, CSIC-UV).
We talked to José Luis García, director of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (CSIC-UV), who told us how his centre is adapting to the health emergency, what difficulties they are encountering, and what actions they are taking to help this crisis end as soon as possible.
How is the I2SysBio adapting to the current situation?
Since the beginning of the state of alarm we have followed the indications given to us by the CSIC and the Universitat de València. The first thing we did was to reduce on-site activity at the institute to a minimum. We are only maintaining the essential services, which are basically used to keep the live collections we have of plants, cells, viruses, and insects. That maintenance is necessary so that we can continue with the experiments when we can.
We have a minimal administrative presence, and then there is the maintenance of the building which depends on the Universitat de València. We are granting about 14 or 15 mobility permits to go to the centre every day, which indicates that right now there are very few people working there. We keep a record of all people entering and leaving as requested by the Universitat and the Regional Ministry. Almost all the work is being done online. The students are no longer working either. And the little research activity that continues is related to COVID-19. We have also stopped all lines of research, as the message from the CSIC and the Universitat was to limit ourselves to essential activities.
What are the biggest difficulties you are facing?
Right now, we are having trouble finding supplies of PPE with a view to returning to work. We donated all our supplies to the Hospital Clínic at the beginning of the crisis. We are also having trouble getting hydro-alcoholic gel. Everything that has to do with supply of material to be able to return to work.
It was not easy to convince the researchers that all the activity had to be stopped either, but people understood it well. At first, we were more permissive so that people could close their work reasonably. Right now, everything is closed. Besides, we must justify the permits we give.
With online work we are working very well. We use the CSIC's video conference and chat a lot. As more than half of the scientists at the centre are working on research that can be related to COVID-19, we are very aware of that chat. I think that right now I must be spending 14 hours a day in front of the computer, doing work online.
How is I2SysBio contributing to the fight against COVID-19?
We have requested about twelve projects from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, through the CSIC and the Universitat. We have also submitted projects to the AVI call for proposals. In addition, we participated in the call of La Caixa, although those are more oriented to transference; and now we are also presenting ourselves to the call of Santander. And we are working on projects with our partner Biopolis ADM.
One of the projects we are developing with several CSIC centres: the Centre for Biological Research, the Institute of Medical Chemistry and with the Institute of Biomedicine in Valencia, is a project to find antiviral substances. The same project has also been financed by the AVI to detect blocking antibodies. It is a chimeric virus that we have designed, and we are studying its application to design a vaccine. To a large extent our researchers are virologists, and we have been working with human viruses for a long time, so adapting to working with COVID-19 has been relatively easy.
We also have a line of epidemiology that has been funded through the CSIC and directed by Iñaki Comas of the IBV, in which we will track the COVID-19 viruses and study how they have spread in Spain. We are working with IATA on a project to detect traces of COVID-19 in wastewater.
We are also requesting projects for the diagnosis of COVID-19. These are projects that have a very large transfer capacity, and we are already talking to companies, so I cannot tell you much more.
And finally, we are working with our partners at Biopolis to develop vaccine probiotics against COVID-19.
We do research in the clinical, epidemiological, environmental, and diagnostic fields, so we have a lot of work to do.
I would like to highlight that we are in very good tune with other CSIC centres, especially IATA and IBV, and we are doing very interesting things together.
