COVID-19 Projects
ISARIC-4C Study
CO-CIN
Prof Calum Semple, member of the HPRU and the ISARIC-4C consortium, is analysing and reporting clinical characteristics of patients admitted to hospital with SARS-CoV-2 infection in near real-time to the COVID-19 Clinical Information Network (CO-CIN). CO-CIN informs the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on a weekly basis about the clinical evolution of disease in the United Kingdom. To achieve this, clinical research nurses and administrators gather anonymised data from clinical notes and enter it into a simple online database. This allows to characterise the patients’ clinical features as well as risk factors associated with severity, risk of hospitalisation and death. The information gathered is essential to help health service planning and provision, and to rapidly evaluate the impact of interventions such as new therapeutics or vaccines. The first summary report is available here.
Prof Calum Semple is leading an International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) - Clinical Characterisation Protocol UK (CCP-UK), a nationwide observational study that is intended to activate in the event of the appearance or outbreak of a disease of public health importance. Calum’s Medical Research Council-funded CCP-UK study, with additional support from the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections at Liverpool, is collecting clinical data and biological samples to describe and characterise COVID-19 disease, inform management, and to act as a platform for clinical trials into new treatments. Samples from patients have been shared with co-applicants at Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol and Public Health England (PHE).
Dr Lance Turtle is receiving CCP-UK acute blood samples which will be used for flow cytometry to investigate the role of cellular immunity in COVID-19 disease. Turtle also collects convalescent samples from recovered patients and contribute to an epitope mapping project with colleagues in Sheffield and Oxford.
Prof Julian Hiscox is developing rapid approaches for sequencing SARS-CoV-2 in samples from patients as well as validating animal models for vaccine development and medical countermeasures. With Profs Al Darby and Steve Patterson in the Centre for Genomic Research (CGR) at the University of Liverpool, his laboratory are part of a PHE funded collaboration to provide virus sequencing for transmission studies in real time. His team are also working on samples from the CCP-UK study.
See update here
Understanding the dynamics of policy development and healthcare worker behaviour in the UK during the COVID-19 public health emergency
In an infectious disease outbreak public health policymakers are under tremendous pressure, especially from the media. They must respond rapidly to and take decisions which impact enormously on healthcare provision.
Prof Sally Sheard and colleagues are studying conventional and social media trends during the COVID-19 epidemic, and are linking these to changes in UK policy, gaining unique insights through collaboration with key policy players. These include members of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) that advises the Government, and Public Health England leaders. These experts are recording information on key meetings and events, and giving regular interviews their perspectives can be captured in real-time.
Sheard's team also examines the impact of the policy changes on healthcare workers in general practice and hospitals, through interviews and observations. Healthcare workers' perspective on delivering care during the epidemic, and how they perceive the changes in policy is fed back to policymakers during the outbreak. The approach is novel because policy decisions are usually only studied after an event, making the findings less reliable.
This research was piloted with pump-prime funding from the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections at Liverpool, and has been scaled up with support from the Medical Research Council.
Dr Emily Adams, Senior Lecturer in Diagnostics for Infectious Disease, at LSTM has begun the validation process for the Mologic COVID-19 point-of-need diagnostic test:
- Independent assessment and validation of COVID-19 diagnostic test has been initiated at LSTM by Dr Adams and her research group, along with colleagues at St George's University London
- Prototypes will be sent to world-leading labs in the UK, Senegal, Spain, China, Malaysia and Brazil for priority validation
- COVID-19 tests will be jointly manufactured in the UK at Mologic and in Senegal at Institut Pasteur de Dakar for the first time
- Dr Adams said: “These tests could be a game-changer for diagnosis and follow-up of patients both in hospital and in the community, allowing us to detect cases early and isolate patients and their families rapidly.”
Emily commented: “We are extremely pleased to be working alongside Mologic and diaTROPiX on the evaluation and validation of rapid diagnostic tests for COVID-19. These tests could be a game changer for diagnosis and follow-up of patients both in hospital and in the community, allowing us to detect cases early and isolate patients and their families rapidly. Of course in low-resource settings, where we are starting to see cases, these are the only tests that are appropriate for use. We need to manufacture and deliver as soon as we possibly can” Read more here
Funding has been awarded to 22 projects across the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and the University of Liverpool (UoL) in response to COVID-19, working with the NHS and industry partners.
Each project and lead is outlined below:
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Project
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Lead
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Institute
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Liverpool Household COVID-19 Cohort Study
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Professor Neil French
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UoL
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Provide underpinning virus and host biology for the Liverpool Malawi COVID-19 consortium and investigate whether some strains of SARS-CoV-2 are more virulent than others
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Professor Julian Hiscox
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UoL
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Point-of-care diagnostics for community settings in COVID-LIV
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Dr Emily Adams
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LSTM
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SARS-CoV-2 Acquisition in Frontline Health Care Workers – Evaluation to Inform Response (SAFER)
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Dr Naomi Walker
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LSTM
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Natural history of immunity to SARS-CoV-2
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Dr Lance Turtle
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UoL
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COVID-PREP (Pregnancy Testing Pilot)
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Professor Louise Kenny
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UoL
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Drug Candidate Selection of an Improved 4-Amino Quinoline for Clinical Trials against COVID-19
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Professor Giancarlo Biagini
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LSTM
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Dose selection of therapeutics targeting COVID-19 using the hollow fibre infection model
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Dr Shampa Das
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UoL
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COVID-19 in pregnant women, neonates and children presenting to QECH, Malawi – an in-depth study using ISARIC protocol
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Dr Samantha Lissauer
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UoL
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Liver-POOL together
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Professor Luis Cuevas
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LSTM
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Developing GCP assays for experimental COVID therapies and preclinical proof-of-concept studies - requested
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Professor Saye Khoo and Professor Andrew Owen
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UoL
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Establishment of in vitro SARS-CoV-2 drug screening platforms
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Professor Giancarlo Biagini
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LSTM
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The role of ACE2R expression in protecting children from severe acute respiratory syndrome in COVID-19 disease, and severe susceptibility in adults
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Professor Paul McNamara
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UoL
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COVID-LIV Cohort Study: The Psychological and social impact of COVID-19
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Professor Kate Bennett and Professor Rhiannon Corcoran
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UoL
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Modelling the impact of weather on SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk
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Professor Matthew Baylis
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UoL
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Area D: Distortion of Health and Social Care Systems
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Professor Sally Theobald
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LSTM
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Social Science Area F: Generating actionable evidence for containing the spread of misinformation
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Dr Mark Green
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UoL
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Biomarkers in Respiratory Immunology
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Dr Andrea Collins
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LSTM
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Responding to the COVID-19 economic (after)shocks: Developing learning and resources to strengthen the resilience of the Liverpool City Region economy
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Professor Mark Boyle
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UoL
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Area B: Understanding choice, control and risk in public and community responses to the COVID-19 epidemic across the health divide to inform public health strategies in UK and Malawi
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Dr Nicola Desmond and Professor Mark Gabbay
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LSTM, UoL
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Using Tweets to Fight COVID-19
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Professor Simon Maskell
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UoL
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The impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of young adolescents in the UK
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Professor Helen Sharp
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UoL
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Latest COVID-19 Publications
Amplicon based MinION sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 and metagenomic characterisation of nasopharyngeal swabs from patients with COVID-19
Shona C Moore, Rebekah Penrice-Randal, Muhannad Alruwaili, Xiaofeng Dong, Steven T Pullan, Daniel Carter, Kevin Bewley, Qin Zhao, Yani Sun, Catherine Hartley, En-min Zhou, Tom Solomon, Michael B. J. Beadsworth, James Cruise, Debby Bogaert, Derrick W T Crook, David A Matthews, Andrew D. Davidson, Zana Mahmood, Waleed Aljabr, Julian Druce, Richard T Vipond, Lisa Ng, Laurent Renia, Peter Openshaw, J Kenneth Baillie, Miles W Carroll, Calum Semple, Lance Turtle, Julian Alexander Hiscox.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.20032011
BMJ Best Practice monograph: COVID-19
Nick Beeching, Tom Fletcher, Robert Fowler.
Characterisation of the transcriptome and proteome of SARS-CoV-2 using direct RNA sequencing and tandem mass spectrometry reveals evidence for a cell passage induced in-frame deletion in the spike glycoprotein that removes the furin-like cleavage site
Andrew D.Davidson, Maia KavanaghWilliamson, SebastianLewis, DeborahShoemark, Miles W.Carroll, KateHeesom, MariaZambon, JoannaEllis, Phillip A.Lewis, Julian A.Hiscox, David A.Matthews
