As we announced in April, at Alting we have helped set up a biobank of Covid-19 positive samples through a donation to the Research Institute of Sant Pau Hospital (IR Sant Pau).

Through months of exhaustive work, the IR Sant Pau Covid-19 Biobank has collected over 3,000 samples from patients who have tested positive for Covid-19.

According to IR Sant Pau, it is a technically and logistically complex project for several reasons:

• The difficulties inherent in collecting the samples.
• The high risk of infection.
• The difficulties involved in getting the required consent.
• And the fact that the Medical Research Ethics Committee is overwhelmed.

This means it is costly, takes many staff hours and implies significant use of laboratory materials and PPE.

So, Alting's contribution to the project has been very important, enabling the following actions over these past months:

1/ Designing the circuits for collecting, processing, storing and making samples available to researchers.

Three parallel circuits have been established to collect left-over diagnostic materials from Covid-19 patients:

1. With Hospital Sant Pau: samples from hospitalized patients who voluntarily give signed consent.
2. With the Hospital Sant Pau workplace health and safety team: samples left over from seroprevalence studies on staff at the hospital and IR-Sant Pau who have given signed consent.
3. And with the EAP Sardenya primary care center, a member of the IIB Sant Pau: collecting samples from patients who don't need to be hospitalized.

Plus, work is currently underway to establish another circuit to collect samples from Hospital Dos de Maig.

2/ Hiring new staff

Hiring the following staff members:

• A lab tech to process samples left over from diagnostic tests for 4 months.
• A lab tech to collect clinical data for the samples for 6 months.
• A lab tech to extract DNA from the diagnostic left-over samples for 6 months. This contract is ongoing.

3/ Acquiring laboratory materials and PPE.

And getting the lab materials and PPE needed to process and store the samples from Covid-19 patients..

Alting social projects 2020

From the very beginning, Alting has participated actively in social projects and supports research, thinking of our present and future.

Likewise, a few weeks ago Alting joined the “El Gran Recapte” annual campaign, at a time when donations are so necessary to cover the huge demand the food bank is currently experiencing.

At Alting we are truly grateful for all the work foundations, associations, volunteers and donors do to make these and other charity projects possible.

For more information, contact comunicacion@alting.com.