Foundation helps Imperial's contact-tracing research

A Chinese family foundation has donated 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) to a new contact-tracing pilot being conducted by Imperial College London, and for work on diagnostics to help find effective strategies to suppress COVID-19 transmissions.

The gift from the Huo Family Foundation will support the work of Professor Paul Elliott, director of the Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission Programme, which is also known as REACT.

The donation came as policymakers around the world, including those in the United Kingdom, seek more effective novel coronavirus contact-tracing technology and techniques.

The REACT program, led by a team of scientists, clinicians, and researchers at the university alongside colleagues at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and Ipsos MORI, involves the testing of swabs taken in homes each month by more than 100,000 people in England to determine the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in the community.

The project is also assessing the feasibility of mass home antibody testing, which could indicate how many people have been infected and recovered since the outbreak began.

This month, the program published its second report, which revealed that infection rates in England continued to decline between June 19 and July 8, despite the easing of lockdown measures.

Some 81 percent of participants who tested positive for novel coronavirus were shown not to have experienced symptoms in the seven days prior, or on the day of the swab test.

The funding will allow the REACT team to convene a cross-disciplinary group of epidemiologists, statisticians, public health specialists, clinicians, virologists, and data scientists to design and conduct studies of contact-tracing and transmission.

The research will focus on expanded testing at Imperial College London that aims to maintain a safe environment as students and faculty return to campus. Those who test positive will be followed up intensively in order to identify the likely source and spread.

The study will identify the contribution of different testing and tracing methods to limiting transmission, and which strategies are effective and deliverable at a local level for educational and work settings.

Elliott said: "In the global fight against COVID-19, it is likely that governments end up with relative control of the virus at a national or regional level, but with an ongoing risk of localized clusters of infection that, left unchecked, could rapidly develop into major outbreaks. University campuses are a key setting that could contribute to extensive spread or, with appropriate interventions, to enhanced control.

"To manage this risk, it is important to be able to identify emerging COVID-19 transmission hotspots on campus through regular testing and to understand how to intervene to successfully control new clusters of infections, for example through contact-tracing and early treatment."

Huo Yan, founder of the Huo Family Foundation said: "It is essential we do all we can to tackle the spread of COVID-19, which continues to affect millions of lives across the world.

"We are pleased to support the vital contact-tracing technology development work of Professor Paul Elliott and the REACT program. We appreciate the urgent nature of this research and are supporting several projects in this field."

The donation builds on a wide groundswell of support from alumni and donors that is helping drive critical novel coronavirus research across the college.

Imperial College London's COVID-19 Response Fund, which was launched in March, provides a means for donors to contribute to a pooled fund that will give the college the flexibility to quickly support high-impact projects in the university's efforts to tackle COVID-19.

WANG MINGJIE in London