The INCLIVA Biomedical Research Institute of the Clinical Hospital of Valencia has obtained funding from the Carlos III Institute of Health (ISCIII) for the project ‘Rapid detection and characterisation of COVID-19 and the patient’. The main researcher is Felipe Javier Chaves, director of INCLIVA’s Genomics and Diabetes Unit; and the Microbiology and Parasitology Service of the Clinical Hospital of Valencia collaborates in the project. This service is directed by David Navarro, Full Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Ecology of the University of Valencia.
The project has been presented within the framework of the call for an urgent request for expressions of interest for extraordinary funding of research projects on SARS-COV-2 and the disease COVID-19, aimed at promoting proposals “that allow an implementation and immediate launching in the National Health System, with specific, early results applicable to the current situation” of urgency generated by the impact of this pandemic.
The study focuses on detecting the infection quickly and obtaining information on the sequence of the virus to determine its virulence. In addition, it will analyse the genetic factors of the patient that modulate the effect of the infection. With these data, the risk of each patient and the evolution of the disease can be determined.
To do this, low-cost modular kits will be developed that can work from samples of different origins. The procedure will be simple and minimal manipulation for both sample processing and results analysis. The kits will determine the presence of the virus in 15 to 30 minutes and the genetic aspects of the virus and the patient in 3 or 4 hours.
The kits will be based on isothermal amplification and by rapid PCR of the regions of interest and their rapid detection. In a second module, from these amplifications and those of interest in relation to the patient, libraries will be generated to be sequenced by Nanopore NGS (New Generation Third Generation Sequencing) systems. This way, through a report based on the available data and including other clinical variables of interest, it will be possible to know the virus strain and the patient variables that are relevant to the disease.
The impact will be very high when having in 1 or 2 months tests that will detect the presence of the virus in small quantities (between 1 and 10 copies of the virus in the sample). It will also find the infection in exposed persons, the infective capacity and how the infection could proceed based on the strain to which it has been exposed and its genetic characteristics. This will allow to quickly identify infected patients and those who can develop the disease with more complications. The project will take twelve months to complete and the ISCIII is funded with € 175,000.
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