COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Information

A collection of blogs discussing the COVID-19 pandemic, testing and SARS-CoV-2 research.

From Primate Models to SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing and Testing

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread around the world in early 2020, many researchers shifted their focus to support the global endeavors to address the challenge. For two professors at the University of Wisconsin, their efforts started with animal models to study pathogenicity and grew into massive SARS-CoV-2 sequencing and COVID-19 testing projects.

Virologists David and Shelby O'Connor (shown running along Lake Mendota) have worked extensively in SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing and COVID-19 Testing

“Being a scientist in this field gives a sense of purpose, but also a sense of obligation and responsibility,” says David O’Connor, PhD. “You always want to feel like you’re living up to that.”

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Engineering a Safer SARS-CoV-2 for Use in the Research Laboratory

Posted on by Sara Klink
This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2. Photo Credit: Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM CDC
SARS-CoV-2 illustration from CDC; Photo Credit: Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM
E = envelope; M = membrane

A worldwide pandemic requires scientific research to understand the viral pathogen. The focused efforts of global scientists are even more necessary in the face of a novel coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. However, because SARS-CoV-2 causes human disease, research efforts are restricted by the need for physical laboratories that are equipped to handle the required level of containment and personnel trained to handle pathogens in these facilities. But what if we could bypass the restrictive facility requirements by engineering a synthetic, replication-defective version of SARS-CoV-2 that more researchers could use to study the pandemic coronavirus, expanding the capacity to test and develop methods to attenuate its devastating effect on humans?

The challenge is to develop a derivative of SARS-CoV-2 that reflects how it behaves in the cell but is compromised such that it is unable to infect cells more than a single time. That is, the virus can get into a cell or be introduced into cells and replicate but is unable to produce infectious virus would offer a pathway to expand research capacity without the use of special laboratory facilities. This replication-defective SARS-CoV-2 could be created to encode as much or as little of the genome needed to examine its lifecycle without becoming a fully infectious virus. In fact, this replication-defective version of SARS-CoV-2 could include additional genetic elements that could be used to control its expression, track the virus in cells and measure the level of its replication. This task has been undertaken by Dr. Bill Sudgen’s group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, explained by graduate student Rebecca Hutcheson during her presentation “Making the Virus Causing COVID-19 Safe for Research”.

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Buckling Down to Scale Up: Providing Support Through the Pandemic

Posted on by Riley Bell

The past year has been a challenge. Amidst the pandemic, we’re thankful for the tireless work of our dedicated employees. With their support, we have continuously stayed engaged and prepared during all stages of the COVID-19 pandemic so that we can serve our customers at the highest levels.

How We Got Here

The persistent work by our teams has made a great impact on the support we can provide for scientists and our community during the pandemic. From scaling up manufacturing to investing in new automation, every effort has helped.

Promega has a long history of manufacturing reagents, assays, and benchtop instruments for both researching and testing viruses. When the pandemic began in 2020, we responded quickly and efficiently to unprecedented demands. In the past year, we experienced an approximately 10-fold increase in demand for finished catalog and custom products for COVID-19 testing. In response to these demands, we increased production lines. One year ago, we ran one shift five days per week. Currently, we run three shifts seven days per week. This change has allowed 50 different Promega products to support SARS-CoV-2 testing globally in hospitals, clinical diagnostic laboratories, and molecular diagnostic manufacturers. Additionally, our clinical diagnostics materials make up about 2/3 of COVID-19 PCR tests on the global market today. Since January 2020, Promega has supplied enough reagents to enable testing an estimated 700 million samples for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide.

Developments and Advances

Promega products are used in viral and vaccine research. This year, our technologies have been leveraged for virtually every step of pandemic response from understanding SARS-CoV-2 to testing to research studies looking at vaccine response.

Promega product: The Lumit™ Dx SARS-CoV-2 Immunoassay

Who Got Us Here

We are extremely grateful for our employees. In the past year, we hired over 100 people and still have positions open today. While welcoming newcomers, this challenging year also reinforced the importance of our collaborative culture. Relationships at Promega have been built over multiple years. The long history of our teams allows us to stay coordinated while prioritizing product distribution to customers across the globe. It also leads to effective communication with colleagues and vendors. Those leading our manufacturing operations team, for example, have an average tenure of 15 years. Their history in collaborating through challenging situations helps them quickly focus where needed most.

Our 600 on-site employees support product manufacturing, quality, and R&D. They do it all while remaining COVID-conscious by social distancing, wearing masks, working split shifts, and restricting movement between buildings. While we continue to practice physical safety precautions, we also prioritize our employees’ mental health and wellness. Promega provides a variety of wellness resources including phone and video mental health sessions, virtual fitness and nutrition classes, and stress and anxiety tools.

What’s to Come

While we acknowledge that the COVID-19 is not over, we are proud of the support we have been able to provide to customers working both on pandemic research and critical research not related to COVID-19. Our policies of long-term planning and investing in the future has allowed us to respond quickly and creatively and learn from the experience.

Related Posts

Your Brain on COVID-19: Neurotropic Properties of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

Updated 4/29/2022 by AnnaKay Kruger

Artist conception of coronavirus in the brain. Researchers are investigating the neurotropic effects of SARS-CoV-2

Viruses are both fascinating and terrifying. Stealthy, insidious and often deadly, they turn our own cells against us. Over the past year, we have all had a firsthand view of what a new and unknown virus can do. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has caused a global pandemic, and left scientists and medical professionals scrambling to unravel its mysteries and find ways to stop it.

COVID-19 is considered a respiratory disease, but we know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect other systems in the body including the vascular and central nervous systems. In fact, some of the most noted symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, headache, and the loss of the sense of taste and smell, are neurological— not respiratory— symptoms.

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Intranasal COVID-19 Vaccines: What the Nose Knows

Posted on by Ken Doyle

COVID-19 vaccine distribution efforts are underway in several countries. Recently, the Serum Institute of India celebrated the nationwide rollout of its Covishield vaccine, kicking off the country’s largest ever vaccination program. Meanwhile, many other vaccines against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 are in either preclinical studies or clinical trials. At present, 19 vaccine candidates are in Phase 3 clinical trials, while 8 vaccines have been granted emergency use authorization (EUA) in at least one country.

intranasal covid-19 vaccine coronavirus

In the US, mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are in distribution. Adenoviral vector vaccines authorized for distribution include Oxford/AstraZeneca AZD1222 in the UK (Covishield in India) and Gamaleya Sputnik V in Russia. A third type of vaccine consists of inactivated coronavirus particles, such as those developed by Sinopharm and Sinovac in China.

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Ramping Up COVID-19 Testing with the Maxwell® HT Viral TNA Kit

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva
COVID-19 testing with Maxwell HT

John Longshore admits that he was not a big Promega customer before the COVID-19 pandemic. His team uses a wide variety of suppliers to assemble the types of testing protocols needed to serve over 50 hospitals. However, when he began to face supply chain disruptions in early 2020, he needed a supplier he could depend on to support the rapid scale-up of COVID-19 testing, and Promega rose to the occasion.

“When we started working with Promega for bulk isolation reagents, our ask was, ‘Can you supply us with 15,000 isolation reagents per week?’” John says. “The answer was yes, and we have gotten everything we’ve asked for on the dates that it was promised.”

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Adenoviral Vector Vaccines for COVID-19: A New Hope?

Posted on by Ken Doyle

The global war against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 rages on, spearheaded by efforts to develop effective and safe vaccines. At the time of writing, over 100 COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials were listed in the clinicaltrials.gov database. Recent attention has focused on mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. If licensed, they would become the first mRNA vaccines for human use.

Other vaccine development efforts are relying on more conventional techniques—using an adenoviral vector to deliver a DNA molecule that encodes the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein. Examples of these adenoviral vector vaccines include the vaccines from Oxford University/AstraZeneca (the UK), Cansino Biologics (China), Sputnik V (Russia) and Janssen Pharmaceuticals/Johnson & Johnson (the Netherlands and USA).

sars-cov-2 coronavirus covid-19 infection with antibodies from a vaccine attacking the virus; several vaccines are in development including adenoviral vector vaccines
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Automation Helps A Graduate Student Monitor COVID-19 With Wastewater

Posted on by Johanna Lee
Kasia Slipko (middle) and her lab at Vienna University of Technology. She and colleagues are exploring using wastewater to monitor viral disease outbreaks.
Kasia Slipko (middle) and her lab at Vienna University of Technology. She and colleagues are exploring using wastewater to monitor viral disease outbreaks.

When Kasia Slipko started graduate school at Vienna University of Technology, Institute for Water Quality and Resource Management, she was interested in studying antibiotic resistant microbes in wastewater. For three years, she evaluated different wastewater treatment methods to find out how to remove antibiotic resistant bacteria. But in the spring of 2020, her research took an unexpected turn. That was when the COVID-19 global pandemic hit, caused by the rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Kasia soon found herself at the forefront of another exciting field: using wastewater to monitor viral disease outbreaks.

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SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein and PA28γ: A Role in Pathogenesis?

Posted on by Gary Kobs

The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein accounts for the largest proportion of viral structural proteins and is the most abundant protein in infected cells. Nucleocapsid proteins have the job of “packaging” the viral nucleic acid (in this case, RNA). Viral nucleocapsid proteins can also enter the host nucleus and interact with a variety of host proteins to interfere with critical processes of the host cell, including protein degradation. Here we review a study that used an in vitro protein degradation assay to investigate the interaction of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein and the proteasome activator PA28γ.

SARS-CoV-2 structural diagram, showing the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein composed of RNA and N protein.

In SARS-CoV-2 infections, the nucleocapsid protein is critical for infection, replication and packaging. The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein is not only localized in the cytosol of the host cell but also is translocated into the nucleus. There, it interacts with various cellular proteins that modulate cellular functions, such as the degradation of unneeded or damaged proteins by proteolysis. Researchers have proposed that the protein degradation system plays an important part in coronavirus infection (1).

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How A New SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Testing Kit is Helping Campuses Reopen

Posted on by Johanna Lee

The fall of 2020 was like no other, especially for universities. The COVID-19 pandemic hit most of the world in the spring, forcing schools and businesses to close. For months, people worked from home and schools switched to online classes. When fall came, universities had a difficult decision to make. Do they have students and staff come back to campus for in-person classes? With students living together in close proximity in dormitories, an outbreak could quickly get out of hand. How can the university monitor and control the spread of the virus to ensure everyone’s safety?

This was when Robert Brooks started getting calls. He’s the Technical Director and Operations Manager at Microbac Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Microbac is a network of privately owned laboratories that provide testing services for food products, environmental samples and the life science industry. Robert has been in the lab industry for 25 years and has established a reputation for taking on difficult problems. “We really try to go that extra mile to help clients solve their issues. That has made a name for us out there. When people have odd-ball issues, they give us a call cause we’re going to take a look at it from a couple different viewpoints and take a step-by-step approach,” he says.

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