In the Fight against COVID-19, Science is Surging!

This blog was originally posted on LinkedIn

From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we knew our customers would need an unprecedented amount of scientific and technical support. That is why we quickly created a “COVID-19 Innovation Response Team” to bring Waters’ industry-leading expertise to the forefront of the global scientific surge to quickly and effectively deliver diagnostics, therapies and vaccines. By combining our resources with those on the front lines focused on the biology of the virus and a range of interventions, we know we can help accelerate the ultimate solutions to this problem.

The Waters COVID-19 Innovation Response Team is an extension of our long history of assisting the global scientific community in a time of need, and doing so through partnership. I am pleased to say that we’ve already seen a positive impact of these collaborative efforts:

• In the EU, Waters donated columns, service and instrumentation to hospital laboratories in Milan, Turin and Rome in Italy and in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseilles and Paris in France. Those donations will support drug monitoring and research for potential Coronavirus therapies. In the UK, our Wexford, Ireland team have been working overtime to quickly deliver new mass spectrometry instruments to researchers for measuring potential new COVID-19 drugs in experimental models of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
• We have begun work with a large academic medical center in New York, the epicenter of the US pandemic, to help them with research and potential therapies.
• Throughout North America, we are providing our unique glycan analysis capabilities to vaccine developers. The significance of glycosylation as an antigen is underscored by numerous recent publications on the structural biology of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We are enabling high-resolution, high-sensitivity molecular glycan fingerprints in just minutes, versus the days typically needed with traditional approaches.
• We have played a key role in bringing Coronavirus test kits to market with reliability and reproducibility. Oligonucleotide primers and probes are a primary component to diagnostic kits for SARS-CoV-2. Our leading chromatographic technologies have allowed kit manufacturers to purify and QC these reagents.

These are just a few examples of the work being done by the Waters COVID-19 Innovation Response Team. We are here to help, and driven to Deliver Benefit to those on the front lines by sharing our expertise, resources and support. For more information, please visit our Coronavirus Resource Hub.

This challenge is far too great for any organization to tackle alone. I am amazed by the global surge in science to defeat COVID-19, and working together as a scientific community, I know we will!