So today I'm speaking to Prof Mark Ferguson, director general of SFI, about
how the agency is responding to the Covid-19 19 crisis. Mark, could you tell
us a little bit about SFI's five-point plan when it comes to dealing with Covid-19
and how successful it has been so far? Mark: First of course we have our Rapid
Response Call for proposals so this is soliciting research proposals that will
address the Covid-19 crisis, and I'll speak about that a little bit further.
Then, of course, we have problem curation and that's been going very well
where we've been linking groups of experts with people who want advice. So
for example within the HSE people who are developing the contact-tracing app,
we've put them in contact with all kinds of experts who run Bluetooth looking at
how the app might function, looking at societal acceptability, privacy and so on,
so that they can get real expert input into that. Then, of course, the research
centres from Science Foundation Ireland have been delivering. For example, I-form
has been making protective equipment, Insight has been doing surveys, APC has
been helping with reagent supply and then in the early days we provided a lot
of curated information on our website, you know, where people could go. We then
transformed that to link into other existing databases that sprang up as the
Covid-19 crisis evolved. So we then stepped away a little bit from the
individual curation and more signposted to reliable databases where people could
get information. Colm: so what response have you had to the Covid-19 research call
from SFI and why were these latest 11 projects chosen? Mark:We received more than
500 applications to the rapid response call. Obviously we announced the first
wave of successful projects a few weeks ago, today we're announcing this wave of
11 projects so what's happened is that these projects have all been sent out
for international peer review. They've been looked at in terms of the
excellence of the science the potential impact the relevance and so on and these
have been selected for all the group were sent out about more than
50 cent I so success rate is somewhere between 10 to 20 percent which means a
lot of proposals we received have not been funded and and the proposals have
been selected because they believe the international reviewers believe that
these are state-of-the-art research that it will contribute to our knowledge both
nationally and internationally for managing the pandemic and that will have
a real impact in to Ireland over the next little while so if you look at some
of the projects you can see they range you know from supplying and helping to
design protective wear for frontline health researchers thinking about how
you can have more flexible supply chains and repurposing of manufacturing going
forward thinking about how we could have better modeling for the next wave of
coronavirus infections those kind of things from the central
and of course antibody testing to see whether or not people have been exposed
to the infection and how much of a challenge as it being to balance
obviously the huge focus on covert 19 research but also on the ongoing efforts
among all the other SFI centers and other non covert research it's important
to get that balance right and I mean to date in Ireland we have funded all the
covert 19 projects by reprofiling money that we already had there's been no new
money allocated now that's fine that's actually what you should do in a
pandemic there's obviously an emergency and you need to respond to it and of
course some of the things that we would have anticipated spending money on like
say sponsoring conferences and workshops can take place during a pandemic so it's
really sensible thing to do you know we will be living with the virus for some
considerable period of time we need to understand an awful lot more both about
the fundamental nature of the virus you know how infectious is it what does the
infectious dose what are these super spreaders can you identify them can we
have better modeling for the future you know what can we do is have say a rapid
sheet test so we can move away from social distancing so the good news
is that the research community has contributed significantly to managing
the existing crisis the good news is it's very collaborative and sharing
there's no duplication highly and efficient and that will be required
going forward and we'll have to add that research to the existing body of
research that's ongoing and then of course the challenges of actually the
research community getting back into the laboratories that is now happening with
social distancing they're going to have to be doing shift work 24 hours a day
because you can get fewer people into the laboratories fewer people around
machines and so on so like all aspects of the economy and industry so the
research community is also going to have to adapt to working in these new
conditions well thanks mark for speaking to me
today thank you very much indeed