Ongoing projects – welcoming collaboration

Please do not hesitate to get in touch (coordinator@gci.cam.ac.uk) if we can facilitate your contribution to these projects and if you would like to see your project updated or included in this page.

If we think this is a big issue in the U.S. and Europe, we haven’t seen anything yet (...). People can’t even wash their kids, let alone wash their hands.” 
Dr Adam Coutts, Department of Sociology, "Unprepared for the Worst: World’s Most Vulnerable Brace for Virus"

Integrated human/SARS-CoV-2 metabolic models present novel treatment strategies against COVID-19  
This project demonstrates how the design and development of Integrated human/SARS-CoV-2 metabolic models present novel treatment strategies against COVID-19. Here, we provide a combination of structural and dynamic modeling approaches to predict new drug targets against SARS-CoV-2 and to determine drug optimization strategies.  Our model provides an in-silico comparison of the biochemical demands of the virus versus the host cells and predicts 18 essential reactions as drug targets against SARS-CoV-2. The current publication can be found here.
We are expanding the model to predict the effect of various treatment regimens to ensure maximum drug optimization strategies against the virus. This includes a platform for future studies on viral entry inhibition, antioxidant therapy, and immune regulation. We welcome collaborators and funders who might assist further development of this study to support drug target identification and precision approaches against SARS-CoV-2.

  • Contact point: Bridget Bannerman (bpc28@cam.ac.uk) and Andres Floto (arf27@cam.ac.uk) 

Demystifying the COVID-19 infodemic: Navigating public information campaigns in a digital age.
As part of a research project on conspiracies and COVID-19 supported by the Cambridge-Africa Alborada fund, we have been carrying out research to make sense of the political and social dimensions of the COVID-19 infodemic in African contexts, to better understand its nature, scale, what drives the spread of information and how people actually respond. Misinformation has been rampant around the COVID-19 pandemic, challenging prevention and vaccination campaigns globally, and specifically on the African continent. Addressing the infodemic, however, has been challenged by a lack of understanding about how and why people engage with conspiracies in different contexts. To address this, our project has combined quantitative comparative research on datasets on COVID-19 on Twitter, with qualitative analysis in three countries: Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. We started with topic modelling as a way to get to a more fine-grained analysis of tweets, users, and the country context (including wider media environment). By identifying the reasons why conspiracies take hold in different country contexts, we suggest that situating conspiracies in specific dynamics of trust and mistrust can make an important difference when designing responses to the COVID-19 infodemic. This moves away from a focus on broadcasting truthful information, to interventions that account for deeply rooted sentiments of suspicion towards specific issues and actors, which can vary significantly across communities.
Building from this work, the team is seeking to expand the work on two fronts: 1) a deeper dive into the perspectives and actions of influencers in different countries; and 2) the evolution of narratives around COVID-19 vaccines in African countries to inform campaigns to address information-related challenges to the vaccine roll out. The team welcomes research collaborators and funders who might assist in the rapid extension of the research to the issue of vaccine hesitancy and the COVID-19 vaccine roll out in African countries.


The effects of COVID-19 on education in Ethiopia: Informing short- and medium-term policy responses
As part of the RISE Ethiopia research programme supported by the Cambridge-Africa Alborada fund, we have been carrying out research to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system in Ethiopia. We conducted phone and online interviews with government stakeholders, school principals, teachers and donors in Ethiopia in August 2020 to understand what was being done during the school closures in terms of supporting students’ learning and what was needed for schools to reopen safely. Our research approach allowed us to rapidly collect important information to inform the government’s COVID-19 response strategy while also helping to ensure the safety of fieldworkers and participants. Our established communication and engagement with the Ministry of Education allowed us to quickly communicate the findings of our research and ensure that they helped to inform the governments’ strategy for reopening schools. We recommended strategies to ensure health and safety in schools as they reopen, and we highlighted the need to raise awareness in the community to ensure parents send their children back to school and to provide tutorial classes for students to compensate for lost learning, which were well taken by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education.

  • Further information about the project can be found here and findings from this research can be found on the REAL Centre website and have been published in Perspectives in Education. Contact point: Professor Pauline Rose (pmr43@cam.ac.uk)

Philanthropy and COVID-19: ​Is the North-South balance finally shifting?
The Centre for Strategic Philanthropy (CSP) has produced an initial industry report that will underpin its future research agenda, that examines how COVID19 has impacted the historically unequal philanthropic relations between the Global North and South. The report is the first of the CSP which launched in June 2020 and whose mission is to examine philanthropy in the world’s highest-growth markets focusing on Africa, developing Asia and the Middle East.
Through interviews conducted with two dozen Global South Social Purpose Organisations (SPOs) and foundations during the COVID pandemic – as well as analysis of secondary data – the report finds that COVID-19 has revealed “a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo” in global philanthropy. While philanthropic foundations in the Global North have historically exercised considerable control over how resources are allocated to Global South grantees, the urgent demands of the pandemic have started to shift some control toward Global South organisations.
With the diversion of more and more resources towards public health, the old norms of decision making have been disrupted in favour of organisations with superior local knowledge. Building on these findings, the report calls for three key steps that will help global philanthropy apply the lessons learned from COVID-19 that can improve the impact of Global South philanthropy:
– More funding dedicated to networks to improve infrastructure, capacity and knowledge and create new opportunities for collaboration.
– Improving partnerships between Global South governments and Global South philanthropists and encouraging regulatory reform that can facilitate this.
– Building resilience in the Global South by funding core costs rather than only programme-specific funding with a view to building resilience beyond the crisis.  
The CSP welcomes collaboration with other PIs, post docs and students from the University with proposals for additional research that builds on these findings as it builds out its full research portfolio. The full report can be accessed here.

  • For further details contact the Executive Director, Clare Woodcraft at c.woodcraft@jbs.cam.ac.uk


Effective point-of-use STERilisation of medical equipment using Ethylene Oxide (STEREO)
The project will build local capacity in South Africa and Botswana to produce the highly effective sterilisation chemical, ethylene oxide, to improve sterilisation processes in medical centres. Effective sterilisation is essential to any medical practice, but is even more critical in pandemic response plans to limit infection spread. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted significant disparities in the capacity countries have to respond quickly and effectively to global medical crises. The STEREO project seeks to bridge the gap in one of these areas, by developing a process to produce an essential sterilisation chemical cheaply and efficiently. This will enable local production, giving countries that would previously not have been able to afford the chemical access to this vital process. STEREO brings together partners from the UK (Cambridge), South Africa (University of Johannesburg), and Botswana (BITRI). This working group welcomes the involvement of others in the sterilisation of medical equipment, including industry expertise and local sterilisation needs in Botswana and South Africa, or other countries without access to ethylene oxide, as well as R&D expertise on catalysis. 

  • Find further details about the project here. Contact point: Dr Ewa Marek (ejm94@cam.ac.uk)

Open Ventilator System Initiative (OVSI) – Open source ventilator to be built, assembled and deployed in resource-limited settings based on easily obtainable or manufacturable parts
Members of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, the Whittle Lab, the IfM and the Department of Physics and collaborators from Uganda, Nairobi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Centre for Global Equality and other UK Universities are jointly designing an open source robust and simple to use minimal viable pandemic ventilator which can stand alone for the whole intensive care unit (ICU) journey and that can be built quickly from in-country materials with moderate technical expertise. The primary aim is for this system to be open, readily accessible, affordable, easy to assemble and maintain and to be able to operate in conditions suitable for deployment in lower and middle income countries (LMIC). Further details can be found on the video that shares the project's latest updates and on the recent report covered by BBC Looks East. The working group welcomes the collaboration of PIs, postdocs, students and technical staff from the University as well as partners from Addenbrooke’s and the private sector – and particularly of a PosDoc with experience in mechanical engineering or similar who could help with the hardware of an oxygen concentrator prototype that will feed into the ventilator. 

  • Find further further details about the project at https://ovsi.org/ and join the working group at the OVSI Slack workspace. Contact point: Professor J. Axel Zeitler (jaz22@cam.ac.uk).

Making safer emergency hospitals
In response to the pressures imposed by COVID-19 on hospital facilities globally, healthcare authorities are temporarily adapting  large open halls to increase bed space capacity for housing infected patients.
Professor Andrew Woods FRS (Cambridge’s BP Institute) and Professor Alan Short (Department of Architecture) have, in collaboration with Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC, developed a series of simple, low-cost ventilation designs and configuration solutions to limit infection dispersal of COVID-19 in airborne particles and help to make rapid conversions/adaptations of buildings, safer for patients and healthcare staff.   
As the strategies are light on technology and energy use they can be adapted to work in many different climates and, indeed, the Cambridge team is working with Professor L.S. Shashidhara, Dean of Research at Ashoka University, and advisor to the Indian government and architect C.S. Raghuram, to create viable conversions of marriage halls and sheds as emergency COVID-19 hospitals in India.
Please contact the team for developing or exploring the use of these ideas for emergency hospitals. There are many sustainable options the researchers are open to discussing, and ongoing research will involve testing models in different building environments to provide more “bespoke guidance” for individual settings.  

  • A video summarizing this work is shared here and key publications can be found here and here. Contact point: Rachel Hoffmann (rlh80@cam.ac.uk).

HappyShield – Quick and easy way to mass-produce face shields for health workers in the poorest countries
As the pandemic spreads to poorest parts of the world, concerns are growing for healthcare workers in these areas, who are likely to face even shortfalls in the supply of adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) even greater than those faced by the world's richest countries. Cambridge's Centre for Natural Material Innovation has, in collaboration with University of Queensland's Folded Structures Lab, developed an easy-to-make reusable face shield which folds from a single piece of plastic.   
The working group welcomes the collaboration of i) healthcare workers and organisations in ODA-target countries for obtaining relevant certification and permissions for Happy Shield for use as PPE, ii) manufacturers and workshops with equipment to produce the shield (Die and laser cutters) and iii) translators for the homepage our packaging label content (including instructions and warnings), instructions and video captions currently shared here. 

  • Find further details about HappyShield here and learn about the working group here. Contact point:  natmat@aha.cam.ac.uk
Post-COVID19 economic model to be adopted by the Galapagos
Dr Chris Sandbrook (Department of Geography) is working with the governing council of the Galapagos towards defining the economic model to pursue post-COVID-19. With a past economy model based on an unsustainably high level of tourism that was interrupted by the pandemic, the Galapagos are committed to analyzing future options and re-thinking policy as part of their commitment to achieving the SDGs.
The working group invites the collaboration of experts in economic modelling – ideally from a development economists.

OpenCovidPledge Initiative​ – Avoiding that Intellectual Property gets in the way of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic

" (...) we used the open license terms for some work we just opened to the public, in collaboration with a large academic community collaborating on testing. (...) Thanks so much for your work on this. Was easy and simple to use the language.” 
COVID-19 open source initiative that adopted an adjusted version of the OpenCovidPledge licensing framework 


Dr Frank Tietze (Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering), Dr Jenny Molloy (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology) and colleagues from Stanford, Berkeley, Utah and CreativeCommons have launched a pledge for the uncertainty of industrial relevant formal Intellectual Property (eg: patented technologies) in businesses working towards responding to COVID-19 to be reduced – which is particularly relevant for firms suddenly entering a business to scale up production of crisis-critical products. Following calls by governments of developing countries such as Costa Rica to the WHO and humanitarian organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières to take down IP barriers – and in alignment with the Wellcome Trust pledge for relevant datasets and academic publications to be freely released –  the OpenCovidPledge calls for the free sharing of COVID-19 relevant IP during the pandemic and provides a licensing framework for others to adopt and adapt. INTEL is among the first large tech companies to adopt our pledge and others are in the process of adopting it.

Supporting health officials to rapidly distinguish between potential cases of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases – based only on clinical and demographic data
Testing and contact tracing have been powerful in China and Europe – but fighting the pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa requires new tools. In support of decisions to be made by health officials in resource-limited setting about the deployment of expensive laboratory testing, Dr Freya Jephcott and Emma Glennon (Department of Veterinary Medicine) initiated the development a platform to rapidly and confidently distinguish between potential outbreaks of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases based only on clinical and demographic data. Data on respiratory disease symptom prevalence is urgently required in order to build up the underlying database, train the models, and test tool’s performance on real outbreak data prior to embarking on field testing – the working group welcomes collaborations with any public health organisation, charity or research institute that might be able to assist with data acquisition or facilitate field testing.

Assessing the effects of school closures in Ethiopia and Rwanda 
Professor Pauline Rose (REAL Centre, Faculty of Education) is collecting information on the effects of school closures in Ethiopia and Rwanda – where Pauline has collaborators for work beyond Education. In Rwanda, for example, phone surveys will be conducted.

Capacity-building for local manufacture of diagnostic reagents in resource-limited settings
Professor Lisa Hall and Dr Jenny Molloy (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology) are working with colleagues in Ghana, Cameroon, Chile and elsewhere towards future pandemic-preparedness through local manufacturing of diagnostic reagents. This working group welcomes the involvement of others in national testing strategies in LMICs to form a coalition that could raise awareness of the at international agencies, as well as industry expertise on biomanufacturing, diagnostic manufacturing and particularly standards/quality assurance procedures who might be interested in in resource-limited contexts. Thus far, the group has submitted a proposal to work on trials of point of care RT-LAMP assays in Ghana, received a grant from the Cambridge-Africa Alborada Fund to support automation of COVID testing and RT-LAMP assay development in Ethiopia and established the reclone.org network. 

Other ongoing relevant Cambridge global challenges work

Projects funded by the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA scheme can be found here and those supported by GCRF QR are listed here.Cambridge Veterinary Medicine research team working towards vaccine against COVID-19The race is on to find a vaccine against the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Professor Jonathan Heeney explains why a cautious approach is needed and how his team is using new technology developed for influenza and Ebola viruses to target the new infection here and here. Guardian has also covered Jonathan's work at "It’s a razor’s edge we’re walking': inside the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine".