Nordic Life Science 1
n Finland, the Institute for Molecular Medicine (
FIMM) has launched a COVID-19 host genetics initiative, a community effort to identify genetic variants associated with COVID-19 susceptibility and severity. ”We hope that by finding genetic mutations associated with susceptibility and severity for COVID-19 we can help to identify key genes. This will facilitate drug repurposing, for example by prioritizing drugs that already target those genes. Moreover, human genetic findings can help in prioritizing the development of new drugs,” says Andrea Ganna, FIMM-EMBL Group Leader and researcher specialized in statistical genetics and epidemiology. The initiative has already attracted about a dozen partners around the world. ”There has been an impressive interest from the community. We have more than 50 studies registered. We are preparing an analytical plan and we should be able to get the studies to run the analysis within a couple of weeks,” says Ganna. There are several examples of Nordic companies and scientists making progress in the task of developing new, better and improved testing for COVID-19. For example Sophia Hober, professor of Molecular Biotechnology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH) and her colleagues are developing a serological test for COVID-19 antibodies. The test would be used to confirm whether individuals have had the disease, providing a safer basis for deciding who can return to work without passing on the infection, which is of particular importance for caregivers for the elderly and healthcare workers. The method of analysis has been developed within the national “autoimmunity profiling” infrastructure at SciLifeLab, enabling parallel analysis of hundreds of samples within a few hours. Using the protein production platform developed within the framework of the Human Protein Atlas, the project will now generate a large number of coronavirus proteins and variants thereof. These proteins will then be used to quickly analyze if there are antibodies to the new virus (SARS-CoV-2) in the blood of the sampled individuals. When the method is in place the scientists hope that 7,000 samples can be tested every week. University of Helsinki researchers, in collaboration with American scientists, have also developed an antibody test for the novel coronavirus. Similar, to the KTH test, this test will Sophia Hober, Professor, KTH be able to tell who has already had COVID-19 by detecting antibodies in blood samples that the immune system might have already made to fight against the virus. A different sort of test is being developed by ArcDia, based in Turku, Finland. The company has developed an apparatus for diagnosing respiratory infectious diseases, and state that the same test method can be used for diagnosis of acute infections at the hospital. “Our test reacts exactly to the living virus. This is a huge advantage because patients can be sent home faster for the purpose of releasing hospital resources. Serological tests, tests made from blood samples, detect the virus only after the immune reaction of the patient has been activated, making it a suitable method only for finding out if a person indeed has been infected in the past,” says Vesa Kemppainen, CEO of ArcDia. PHOTO SARA ARNALD