The response of the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation to the pandemic.
At the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation, we believe that research and universal care are fundamental pillars for the protection and improvement of health in our society. We are attentive to the challenges and needs of the institutions that carry them to help and allow them to make significant leaps for the good of patients, their families and by extension the whole of society.
In different fields with diverse needs, the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation has sought initiatives that can contribute to new ways of collaborating in meaningful projects for health.
Faced with the emergency situation created by COVID-19, the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) have launched a collaboration framed in the fight against this pandemic that will mark the 21st century. This is the launch of a major research project that will serve as the basis for designing future strategies for immune protection against SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens.
The Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation wants, with this initiative, to respond to a health emergency situation by providing ISGlobal with the technological, human and logistical equipment necessary to promote various studies and create synergies with other research centres.
Specifically, the implementation of the Project will allow studies to be carried out to know the spread and understand the protection against emerging infections such as that caused by COVID-19, in accordance with the following main objectives:
• The generation of knowledge to understand the spread between the population and how individuals respond to contact with a new virus.
• The catalysis of translational studies with the main hospitals, in order to understand and improve the management of COVID-19 patients.
• Training to become a benchmark in the epidemiological evaluation of the immune response, as well as later in the study of the protective potential of future vaccines.
To achieve these objectives, the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation has endowed the Project with three fundamental pillars to become the reference node in the knowledge of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2:
• Installation of three state-of-the-art multiplex equipment which, combined with new robots that automate the handling of samples, give the possibility of performing many high precision analytics in a very short period of time.
• Incorporation of research staff with different profiles: from laboratory technicians, through specialists in biostatistics and data management to project managers.
• Provision of a significant budget for conducting studies with ISGlobal’s own cohorts and also for establishing new collaborations with hospitals and centres that want to carry out frontier research on the immune response.
