SaS-CoV2 - Spores against SARS-CoV-2 (additional Corona-related funding)

This project takes an innovative approach to the low cost production of reagents for diagnostics to overcome supply chain issues that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and severely constrain the ability of countries to test people for SARS-CoV-2 infection. This situation results in reduced containment of the pandemic, which has huge social and economic costs across the world. For this, the Open Bioeconomy Lab at Cambridge University will provide its collection of open source enzymes for diagnostics and experience in knowledge transfer for local enzyme manufacturing. The innovative production platform for low-resource production of diagnostic enzymes is developed by the Kabisch Lab from TU Darmstadt. The required production processes are developed together with the Ethiopian Biotechnology Institute, which has an ongoing program to locally manufacture reagents and instrumentation for the virus diagnostic method RT-LAMP and is a national COVID-19 testing center, collaborating with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute.