While the Covid-19 pandemic effectively put a halt to many organisations’ workflow, for others it forced research and development to turn in unexpected directions.
For several years the team at Genuity in Cherrywood, Dublin – previously known as Genomics Medicine Ireland – had focused their efforts on using genomics to advance and improve pharmacological interventions.
“Essentially, we provide our pharma customers with expertise to use population genomics to accelerate their drug development programs,” says David Kavanagh, director of clinical partnerships at Genuity.
By collaborating with universities and hospitals, the team at Genuity have been able to effectively reach distinct cohorts within healthcare systems.
“UCD would be one of our main partners in Ireland for our research programs,” says Kavanagh, “we have 11 different programs running there at present, including a Multiple Sclerosis program and an IBD program, patients who attend those clinics can volunteer to give a blood sample and the relevant data from that can be shared for the purpose of research”.
One of the hidden impacts of Covid-19 has been a dearth of patients coming into the hospital for regular clinics, as hospitals postponed or cancelled many of these services to reduce the spread of contamination. The knock-on effect of this is the sudden pause of many clinical trials.
“Aside from Covid research, there is very little research going on in hospitals now,” says Kavanagh, “not just in Ireland, but globally. We will only see the impact of that over the coming years, because drugs that in ordinary circumstances would be being tested in populations are facing delays. As a consequence, the next generation drugs will likely be later on to the market.”
With one avenue of work paused for the time being, the team at Genuity began to look at ways that they could innovate and be of use through the pandemic.
“At the start of the crisis, there was an acute shortage of the reagents required to run large-scale testing for the virus,” says Kavanagh, who notes that one of the company’s strengths is assay development.
“We extended an offer to the National Virus Referencing Laboratory to essentially say that we have the capability and is there a way we can help,” says Kavanagh, “and we effectively became a supplier of the reagents that are required as a component of the test”.
The project to supply reagents, which ran for several months through the pandemic, saw Genuity open their laboratory seven days a week to produce the components for an additional 900,000 tests, which allowed the NVRL to significantly ramp up testing at a crucial time.
“That was one main way we tried to help out through this crisis,” says Kavanagh, “the second way was much closer to our core competency of genomics”.
Looking at efforts that were beginning internationally to understand the virus, the team at Genuity saw a clear way to help.
Free of charge
“We work very closely with Illumunia Cambridge, who supply the sequencing platforms we use and with their support we were able to step in to say that we will do sequencing for free, not as a commercial project for us, but, but purely that we want to help accelerate the research. That support has continued and there’s a number of groups across Ireland we are helping out with that, including the Clinical Research Facility at St. James’s Hospital,” says Kavanagh.
By providing sequencing free of charge, Genuity are helping to speed up essential research into understanding how Covid-19 works.
“There are two aspects we can help research,” says Kavanagh, “one is to understand exactly what is happening with infected humans in terms of genetic influence to the infection. That may give information as to why some individuals who are otherwise very healthy people are ending up in ICU in response to infection, and other similarly healthy people are asymptomatic.”
The second aspect of Covid-19 research involves looking at the virus itself.
"The key question there is trying to figure out how is the virus evolving," says Kavanagh. "Any organism accumulates mutations over time and you can use genomics to track that evolution. There's a consortium spearheaded by Teagasc to understand this and we are coming in providing support in terms of sequencing on that project as well".
The pivot to working on Covid research looks set to last well into the future for the team at Genuity.
“It will take time, and we are just at the start of it,” says Kavanagh. “It is not a quick win. In order to understand the human response to Covid you’re going to need a lot of people to be recruited in a similar way and all of that data to be analysed. That will not just be in Ireland, we will need to participate in a global effort.”