Funding won for a brand new COVID-19 resource
We have been informed that CiteAb has secured funding to develop a new COVID-19 resource to support researchers working to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.
The funding, which comes from the UKRI ‘Ideas to Address COVID-19 – Innovate UK funding strand’, will allow us to further develop our AI-powered data platform to help researchers rapidly identify and evaluate research reagents to investigate and mitigate the effects of COVID-19, and to support product suppliers in developing reagents.
Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency, which drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas. It connects businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth.
Dr Andrew Chalmers, founder of CiteAb, said: “The study of a newly emerged virus like SARS-CoV-2 relies on novel research tools and hundreds of suppliers from across the world are striving to make thousands of such products available to researchers.
“These tools open new opportunities for experiments, but provide a challenge to researchers; how do they efficiently find the reagents they require for their experiments? As we know, purchasing the wrong reagent can waste weeks of research time.
“This funding will allow us to build a dedicated search and discovery platform, developing on our existing AI, to help solve this urgent need and allow researchers to search for COVID-19 products that have been validated or cited in published academic research.
“The project will also allow us to provide data to suppliers of reagents, to help them contribute to fighting the pandemic by informing their strategic product development, sales and marketing of COVID-19 related reagents.”
The team at CiteAb has begun work on this new service, using resources that we can rapidly access and input from existing COVID-19 data portals, and the UK COVID-19 research community. We hope to be able to start sharing data with researchers as soon as possible, with a launch of the new platform by the end of the year.
Dr Chalmers adds: “In developing this platform, we are not only developing a tool for researchers working on responses to COVID-19. The technological framework we establish will be suitable to rapidly repurpose in future, should we be in the unfortunate position of dealing with another epidemic.”
We aim to provide you with updates to this project here on our blog as it develops. If you have any questions about the project then please contact me by email.
– Katrina and the CiteAb team
