Research shows a way forward, but problems are already appearing
Around the UK, researchers, engineers and innovators are working flat out to help defeat the coronavirus pandemic. A chemistry lab at Warwick University is making hand sanitisers for the National Health Service, while academics at University College London are engineering ventilators for hospitals.
Other scientists have rushed to launch studies and trials into diagnostic tools to detect the coronavirus, as well as vaccine candidates and therapies that it is hoped will defeat the disease it causes in the months—or perhaps years—to come.
Some have already claimed significant sums from government for such work.
The University of Oxford has been one of the big winners, netting three of the six grants in the first round of funding from a £20 million Covid-19 programme launched by the National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The university also claimed one of the three grants available from the $20m (£16m) Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator Awards supported by Mastercard, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Those two sets of R&D grants were some of the first announced to tackle Covid-19 after the UK’s first case, a University of York student, was diagnosed on 1 February and the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on 11 March.
But already there are concerns about how much money is available, and where it is going.
“Some limited funds have been made available, but not promoted well across all universities and research organisations,” Lawrence Young, pro-dean of the Warwick Medical School, tells Research Fortnight.
“There is a sense that the ‘usual suspects’ have been able to access these funds more readily and that more innovative and inclusive approaches are needed. This is a situation where we need to work together in a united collaborative effort—it’s a race against the virus, not each other.”
Beyond the £20m made available by UKRI, the country’s largest research funder, for research on the pandemic, the government has announced it will funnel £250m into the global Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is supporting the development of vaccines.
But UKRI and NIHR’s first rapid response call for research proposals on Covid-19, launched on 4 February, took almost two months to announce its first round of winners on 23 March. Some researchers have already complained that they are having to jump through funders’ hoops for grants when they could be working on cures.
One team told The Times newspaper they were “wasting time applying for grants rather than developing drugs to beat the coronavirus because of a huge shortfall in desperately needed funds”.
“This research effort does require better coordination and oversight,” says Young, who is also co-lead of the University of Warwick’s Health Global Research Priority.
UKRI chief executive, Mark Walport, has since promised to streamline grant and innovation applications, and the funder has called for other “research and inno-vation ideas to address Covid-19”, though it has not specified how much money will be available.
Long-term lessons
There are also fears the country is playing catch-up, after years of ignoring the risks of so-called zoonotic viruses that can jump from animals to humans.
“The longer-term lessons for policymakers and funders are that the drivers and factors underlying zoonotic spillover and emergence have been hugely underfunded over the years,” says Andrew Cunningham, professor of wildlife epidemiology and deputy director
of science at the Institute of Zoology in London.
This, he adds, is despite the emergence of Covid-19 not only being predictable but also predicted.
What is needed is “the funding of a new research paradigm involving collaborations across social scientists, ecologists, disease ecologists, veterinarians, medics, virologists and epidemiologists, including modellers, ” Cunningham believes.
As well as further multi-million project grants, he says, the country needs a new centre for biodiversity and public health, which should bring together a range of scientists and students to ensure such a research paradigm develops in the long term and “is not just a knee-jerk flash in the pan post-Covid-19 pandemic”.
Other coronaviruses experts have shown concern that funding and research interest comes and goes in sharp peaks around the time of emerging epidemics, only to be forgotten as funding priorities move on.
Before Covid-19, there were the SARS and MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012, respectively—both zoonotic coronaviruses that most funders and researchers quickly forgot about.
Chris Coleman, assistant professor of infection immunology at the University of Nottingham, studies MERS, which jumped to humans in Saudi Arabia before spreading to several countries.
He says there are two good reasons to study such viruses, regardless of the current situation. First, they are pathogens of importance to human health. Second, they can serve as models for coronaviruses that may emerge in future.
“One big question is how we respond to a future coronavirus outbreak, assuming it is not a virus we have already seen,” he says. “One answer is to have some sort of ‘pan-coronavirus’ therapy— a drug or vaccine that can be used against any coronavirus.”
More funding for such studies could also help prevent or mitigate the next big outbreak.
“Looking around the country and talking to many colleagues over the last few years, we have the sense that virology as a subject has not had the research investment it deserves,” says Young. “Looking now at the economic and social consequences is a real but unfortunate wake up call.”
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight