Saudi Arabia has announced that it will fund a team of scientists and researchers in the Kingdom to take part in the worldwide effort to find a cure for coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Arab News reported.
The Ministry of Health has assembled the team to study the genetics behind the virus, as well as find solutions on how to deal with the outbreak.
The team will include scientists from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), doctors from the Ministry of Health, doctors from Taibah University, and experts from King Abdul Aziz University.
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The group, Arab News, will employ a large scale genome sequencing of COVID-19-positive individuals in order to investigate the genomes of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes the disease—circulating in Saudi.
They said that they have already collected around 600 samples from various cities, and they will use this to optimize nucleic acid-based technology for early detection of the virus in body fluids. From there, they will develop tools to understand the pandemic and look into mutations that could happen, and in turn develop vaccines.
In an interview with Arab News, biomedical researcher Dr. Sharif Hala said that vaccines are not hard to develop, but it could still take time due to various factors—such as lack of finance, production scale, safety issues, and the fact that it has to be tested to a number of subjects in several phases first to determine its efficiency rate.
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