With the latest grants, the Novo Nordisk Foundation has awarded a total of DKK 74.9 million for 43 projects which may help to mitigate the health-related consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic in Denmark.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation announces six new grants for coronavirus-related projects across the Danish Realm. The total funding for the new projects amounts to DKK 7.8 million.
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The new projects will, among other things, focus on developing, optimizing and scaling a clinical system for ensuring speedy and efficient referral and treatment of Danish COVID-19 patients, establishing an emergency national research infrastructure for the collection of blood and tissue samples and data in the Faroe Islands, and ensuring the procurement of equipment and supplementary training of staff to enable the health sector across Greenland to handle epidemic patients.
A unique research infrastructure with biological samples and data
One of the new projects is titled “Emergency national research infrastructure for COVID-19 at Ilegusavnið – The Faroe Islands’ National Human Genetics Resource Centre”. The purpose of the project is to establish a national, broad emergency COVID-19 collaboration over the next six months, with a view to collecting diagnostic blood and tissue samples as well as data relating to COVID-19 in the Faroe Islands.
The aim is to build a unique research infrastructure with biological samples and data from all types of patients, including patients with very early stages of COVID-19 infection, patients with mild symptoms, patients with acute, life-threatening infections and patients who have recovered.
All the biological samples will be made available free of charge to COVID-19-related research projects for the next two years, provided that the projects have obtained the necessary permits from the Research Ethics Committee and the Faroese Data Protection Agency.
