Page 137 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

Online MRC dashboard showing geographical analysis by MRC Wastewater Surveillance
and Research Programme of its findings on incidence of Covid-infected wastewater, 2022.

Complementing these forays into diagnostics were investigations by MRC
units into the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, for instance its mode of transmission, the
immune responses it elicited, the differential severity and duration of its effects, and
its genomic profile and capacity to mutate (i.e. next-generation sequencing). With
regard to the high-level genomic analysis, the MRC took especial pride in the fact
that it supported such research by Professor Tulio de Oliveira and his teams at two
autonomous institutions, the KwaZulu Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform
(KRISP) and the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI), which led
the world in identifying two new SARS-CoV-2 variants that swept around the globe
in 2020 and 2021, the Beta and Omicron strains respectively. ‘It was phenomenal how
we could identify a new emergent virus within days and then develop diagnostics,
develop vaccines and track the vitals in real time’, De Oliveira reflected in retrospect.
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All his bioinformatics servers were based on the MRC’s Cape Town campus – he had
already received several personal grants from the MRC, along with its Gold Merit
Award – while the Network for Genomic Surveillance, which he founded in 2020 as a
consortium of laboratories, scientists and academic institutions to inform responses to
the Covid-19 pandemic with the best scientific information available, benefited from a
large MRC grant. Going by his positive interactions with it, he felt that the MRC was

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