The Guy Foundation has awarded a donation of £80,000 to the Health Care Worker Covid-19 study led by Barts Health NHS Trust in collaboration with The London Nightingale Hospital, UCLH, the Royal Free and Queen Mary University of London.
This important and urgent study will generate a national bioresource with over 200,000 blood and swab samples that will be shared with the UK’s leading research groups as they try to deliver answers to some of the most pressing questions for tackling COVID-19 infection. Led by Professor James Moon and Dr Charlotte Manisty, the study will track 1,000 frontline healthcare workers to examine baseline immune function, earliest immune responses to infection, and the biology of those who get non-hospitalised disease to help researchers find new ways of identifying, safeguarding, treating and preventing infection. This is vitally important since the modelling currently informing all strategies is based on pandemic influenza, not COVID-19.
Professor Geoffrey Guy, Chairman of The Guy Foundation, said “The Trustees of the Foundation are pleased and honoured to support this outstanding initiative and we wish Professor Moon and his team every success with this incredibly important project. The study will be vitally important in informing strategies for managing not only the current pandemic, but will also aid our understanding and response to any future pandemics that we may face.”
Further information about the Health Care Worker Covid-19 study is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Tb8UCkv_E&feature=youtu.be and on the BMJ website here: https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1446
Barts Charity, a leading independent healthcare charity, is coordinating the funding for the research study. Any member of the public wishing to donate directly to study may do so here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/bartscovid19