Baillie lab, Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh
We have been preparing for outbreaks for many years and worked with the WHO on influenza, MERS and Ebola. At the start of 2020 we changed the entire focus of the lab from doing our own research, to supporting multiple strands of a global research effort. For example:
During the outbreak of acute hepatitis of unknown origin, we deployed our efforts to study the source of this infection, discovering a strong association with multiple viruses, and an extremely strong host genetic susceptibility variant .