The COVID-19 pandemic has affected innumerable scientific and technical institutions globally, resulting in lower productivity in a number of fields and programs. However, the impact of the pandemic has also led to the opening of several new research funding lines for government agencies around the world.
Science
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, new and improved forms of scientific communication have evolved. One example is the amount of data being published on preprint servers and the way it has been reviewed on social media platforms before being formally peer reviewed. Scientists are reviewing, editing, analyzing, and publishing manuscripts and data speedily. This intense communication may have enabled an unusual level of collaboration and efficiency among scientists. Francis Collins notes that while he has not seen research move faster, the pace of research "can still feel slow" during a pandemic. The typical research model was considered too slow for the "urgency of the coronavirus threat".
World Health Organization (WHO) On the 4th of May, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) organized a telethon to raise billion from forty countries to support the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. WHO also announced the implementation of an international "solidarity trial" to simultaneously evaluate multiple vaccine candidates reaching phase II-III clinical trials. The "solidarity trial for treatments" is a multinational phase III-IV clinical trial, organized by WHO and its partners, to compare four untested treatments for hospitalized people with severe cases of COVID-19 disease. The trial was announced on March 18, 2020, and by April 21, 2020. Over 100 countries have participated in the trial. In addition, WHO is coordinating an international multisite randomized controlled trial—"solidarity trial for vaccines"—that will allow simultaneous assessment of the benefits and risks of different vaccine candidates being clinically tested in countries with high rates of COVID-19 disease. The WHO Vaccine Coalition prioritizes which vaccines to include in phase II and III clinical trials, and establishes harmonized phase III protocols for all vaccines that reach the pivotal testing phase.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which has established a billion global fund for rapid investment and development of vaccine candidates, indicated in April 2020 that a vaccine could be available under protocols of emergency use in less than 12 months, or by early 2021.
UNESCO The seventh edition of the UNESCO Science Report, which monitors science policy and governance around the world, was in preparation as the COVID-19 pandemic began. As a result, the report documents some of the ways in which scientists, inventors, and governments used science to meet society's needs during the early stages of the pandemic. In the paper, What the COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals About the Evolving Landscape of Scientific Advice, the authors present five countries' case studies (Uruguay, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Ghana, and New Zealand). The authors conclude, "Effective and trusted scientific advice is not simply a function of linkages with the policy-maker. It also involves an effective conversation with stakeholders and the public."
According to the World Health Organization, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Africa contributed 13% of the world's new or adapted technologies, such as robotics, 3D printing, and mobile phone apps. Many countries have accelerated their approval processes for research project proposals. For example, the innovation agencies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have issued calls for research proposals with an expedited approval process through early April 2020. Peru's two innovation agencies reduced their own response time to two weeks, as documented in the UNESCO Science Report (2021).
The UNESCO study of publication trends in 193 countries on the topic of new or re-emerging viruses that can infect humans covered the period from 2011 to 2019 and now provides an overview of the state of research prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Global output on this broad topic increased by only 2% per year between 2011 and 2019, slower than overall global scientific publications. Growth was much higher in individual countries that had to use science to address other viral outbreaks during this period, such as Liberia to combat Ebola or Brazil to combat Zika fever. It remains to be seen whether or not the scientific landscape will shift toward a more proactive approach to health sciences after COVID-19.
National and intergovernmental laboratories The United States Department of Energy federal scientific laboratories, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, closed to all visitors and many employees; non-essential employees and scientists became remote workers. Contractors were also strongly advised to isolate their facilities and employees unless necessary. Overall, ORNL operations remain reasonably unaffected.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was tasked by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to use most of its supercomputing capacity to continue the research on the virus stream, possible mutations, and other factors, while other projects were temporarily scaled back or indefinitely postponed.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) closed all of its six sites in Europe (Barcelona, Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Hinxton, and Rome). All EMBL site governments have implemented strict controls in response to the coronavirus. EMBL staff have been instructed to follow the advice of local authorities. Several staff members have been given permission to work at the sites to provide essential services such as animal facility maintenance or data services. All other staff were instructed to stay at home. EMBL also cancelled all visits to the sites by groups outside the staff. This includes physical attendance at the Heidelberg course and conference program, EMBL-EBI training courses, and all other seminars, courses, and public visits at all sites. Meanwhile, the European Bioinformatics Institute established a European COVID-19 platform for data/information exchange. The goal is to collect and share readily available research data to enable synergy, cross-fertilization, and use of different data sets with varying degrees of aggregation, validation, and/or completeness. The platform is envisioned to consist of two interconnected components, the SARS-CoV-2 data hubs, to organize the flow of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak sequence data and enable comprehensive open data exchange for the European and global research community, and a more comprehensive COVID-19 portal.
World Meteorological Organization The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has expressed concern about the effects of the pandemic on its monitoring system. Observations from the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay program, which uses in-flight measurements from the fleets of 43 airlines, have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent depending on the region. Data from other automated systems have been virtually unaffected, although WMO has expressed concern that repairs and maintenance may be affected eventually. Manual observations, mainly from developing countries, have also seen a significant decrease.
Open science
The need to accelerate open scientific research prompted several civil society organizations to create an Open COVID-19 Pledge asking different industries to release their intellectual property rights during the pandemic to help find a cure for the disease. Several tech giants have joined the pledge, which includes the release of an Open COVID license. Long-time open access advocates such as Creative Commons have launched a myriad of calls and actions to promote open access in science as a key component to combat the disease. These include a public call for open access policies and a call to scientists to adopt zero embargo periods for their publications, applying a CC BY to their articles and a CC0 waiver for research data. Other organizations have challenged the current scientific culture, calling for more open and public science.
For studies and information on coronavirus that can contribute to citizen science through open science, many other online resources are available on other open science and open access websites, including an e-book chapter hosted by the medical collective EMCrit and portals run by Cambridge University Press, the Europe branch of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, The Lancet, John Wiley and Sons, and Springer Nature.
Medical research A JAMA Network Open study examined trends in oncology clinical trials initiated before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was noted that pandemic-related declines in clinical trials raised concerns about the potential negative impact on the development of new cancer therapies and the extent to which these findings could be applied to other diseases.
Computing and machine learning research and citizen science
In March 2020, the United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, NASA, industry, and nine universities pooled resources to access supercomputers from IBM combined with cloud computing resources from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for drug discovery.
The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium also aims to predict the spread of disease, model possible vaccines, and study thousands of chemical compounds to develop a COVID-19 vaccine or therapy. , the Consortium has used up 437 petaFLOPS of computing power.
The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, another consortium of Microsoft, six universities (including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the first consortium), and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Illinois, operating under the auspices of C3.ai, founded by Thomas Siebel, is pooling supercomputing resources for drug discovery, developing medical protocols, and improving public health strategies, and awarded large grants through May 2020 to researchers proposing to use AI for similar tasks.
In March 2020, the Folding@home distributed computing project launched a program to support medical researchers around the world. The first wave of the project will simulate potential target proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and the related SARS-CoV virus, which has already been studied.
In March, the Rosetta@home distributed computing project also joined the effort. The project uses volunteers' computers to model the proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to discover potential drug targets or develop new proteins to neutralize the virus. The researchers announced that using Rosetta@home, they were able to "accurately predict the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus protein weeks before it could be measured in the lab."
In May 2020, the Open Pandemics—COVID-19 partnership was launched between Scripps Research and IBM's World Community Grid. The partnership is a distributed computing project that "will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background [of connected home PCs] that will help predict the efficacy of a particular chemical compound as a potential treatment for COVID-19."
Resources for informatics and scientific crowdsourcing projects on COVID-19 can be found on the internet or as apps. Some examples of such projects are listed below: The Eterna Open-Vaccine project allows video game players to "design an mRNA encoding a potential vaccine against the novel coronavirus." The EU-Citizen Science project provides "a selection of resources related to the current COVID-19 pandemic. It contains links to citizen science and crowdsourcing projects." The COVID-19 Citizen Science project is "a new initiative by University of California, San Francisco physician-scientists" that "will allow anyone in the world age 18 or over to become a citizen scientist advancing understanding of the disease."