CLEAR COVID-19
The collaborative laboratories from the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) and Vossensteyn Biomedical will develop a unique COVID-19 biobank, include viral isolates and nasal airway epithelial cells from patients, which will be used to quantitate in vitro characteristics related to virus-epithelium interactions, and to study correlations with mild or severe COVID-19 in patients. This will be done by assessment of viral replication and epithelial gene expression by single cell RNA sequencing. Additionally, nasal airway epithelial cell cultures will be used for large scale SARS-CoV-2 antiviral drug screening. Drugs of interests are published products and in-house FDA approved drugs (~1400 compounds), proprietary antimicrobial peptides with observed efficacy to SARS-CoV-2 pseudo-virus (Utrecht University) and various products with different modes-of-action from Vossensteyn Biomedical.