Researchers and clinicians working on COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus now have a single web portal where they can access a range of resources to help their work.
The project, called COVID-19 Resources Canada, is led by Guillaume Bourque, director of bioinformatics at the McGill University Genome Innovation Center, and Tara Moriarty, an infection disease specialist at the University of Toronto, and includes a team of 20 volunteers – a mix of STEM researchers, graduate students, medical students, data analysts, postdocs and designers.
The site currently includes a list of volunteer and donation initiatives as well as a volunteer signup form for these calls. A work in progress, the platform is intended to be a hub with information on active research projects, relevant publications, and additional information that may be of use to Canadian research and development around the pandemic. It has sections tailored to scientists, policymakers and the public.
According to the website, the goal is to “support frontline health-care workers; expand capacities of public health and research labs; serve as a source of expertise on COVID-19.”
“We are building a centralized Canadian database of crowdsourced-lists for wanted and offered reagents for clinical applications and also COVID-19 research projects. The data will be organized to enable filtering and navigation, including by location.”
Another one-stop shop for Canadian R&D that went live this week, Cognit.ca, offers a central search engine for researchers, research facilities and intellectual property based out of Canadian universities.
Users type a search term into Cognit.ca and the platform will scour the tri-council awards databases and CFI’s research facilities navigator for relevant projects and researchers. The tool will also retrieve a relevant catalogue of licensing opportunities at Canadian postsecondary institutions and a list of patents filed for by Canadian postsecondary researchers and institutions. Users can also search by a specific name, project title or institution.
The website was created by the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities alongside partners at Universities Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, with help from Mitacs, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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