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These are stormy times. It feels like we’re being buffeted by wind and waves and sometimes wonder if we can take another blow. Back in March, we never expected to be in this here and now. Our closure was earlier than most companies. Since the start of this crisis, we’ve been very responsive to the mood of the Addgenies — and they were very anxious at this point. Here's the message I shared with the Addgenies on March 11, 2020 after rumors spread in our building that someone from a different company had tested positive for COVID-19 (it turned out to be an unfounded rumor).

Scientists need fast access to the tools required to study SARS-CoV-2, but with many academic research labs closed during the pandemic, it’s hard to get these reagents. However, when reagents have been made available through a repository, they remain accessible during these times. Centralized reagent repositories, also known as biobanks, are crucial for the advancement of SARS-CoV-2 research because they provide rapid access to validated reagents, especially during a time when these materials may not be available from their original sources.

This post was contributed by Max W. Shen from MIT, Alvin Hsu Harvard University, and David R. Liu from the Broad Institute and Harvard University.

Over the course of the last six months, COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on our world -- as of June 4, 2020, COVID-19 has caused an estimated total of 380,000 deaths worldwide (statistics provided by Google on 6/4/20). Many countries entered lockdown for weeks to months, pausing or terminating employment for a significant fraction of the workforce.

Wet lab scientists are no exception to this effect -- meticulously designed experiments in labs around the world were put on hold indefinitely due to COVID-19. In our lab, we were interested in examining the effect of COVID-19 on worldwide scientific activity. However, this type of open-ended question is difficult to answer quantitatively without broad, unbiased data. Therefore, we chose to examine a dataset of Liu lab plasmid requests from Addgene, as a proxy for global activity in our particular scientific subfields. 

By Susanna Bachle and Matt Takvorian

When COVID-19 researchers started working with us to help them share their reagents, we knew our role in fighting the pandemic could be even more impactful by reaching more scientists. Many members of the scientific community support open sharing. But, one critical part was missing when the COVID-19 plasmids first became available: distribution was limited to academic scientists.

Nanobodies from camelids have gotten a lot of press for being a promising approach for treatment or prophylaxis of COVID-19. Researchers identified nanobodies that bind to coronavirus spike proteins (Wrapp et al., 2020), which sit on the surface of coronaviruses and enable the virus to enter host cells. To do this, they injected the spike protein from two different coronaviruses into a llama over several days and isolated special camelid antibodies that bind to the spike proteins in cell culture, and inhibit these viruses.