The Gates Foundation donated a collection of no less than 15,000 molecules with healing properties to be tested fully automatically for 2 weeks non-stop. Allegedly, it’s the only lab in the world that can perform such massive tests in such a short time-frame.
A delivery of 15,000 medicinal molecules is expected soon at Gasthuisberg in Leuven, with greetings from former Microsoft boss Bill Gates. That is what De Standaard writes today. At the request and expense of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), KU Leuven will test them in the coming weeks for their potential efficacy against the new corona virus. This virus causes the lung disease COVID-19, which is growing into a worldwide epidemic and against which no medicine exists.
The medicine samples sent from the US come from the portfolio of the Scripps Institute in California. In recent years, this has created an extensive collection of active ingredients of existing or developing drugs against the most diverse disorders.
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hopes that there are one or more molecules among the fifteen thousand substances that can also inhibit the new corona virus,” says Johan Neyts of the Virology laboratory at the Leuven Rega Institute, who will take on the analysis. “We will sort that out for them.”
According to Neyts, the high-biosafety lab of the Rega is perhaps the only one in the world that can test thousands of candidate molecules one after the other at a high throughput speed and in a safe manner. “We know the results a week or two after the shipment is delivered.” The lab was custom designed by Neyts’ colleague Pieter Leyssen, a virologist and self-made engineer. It runs fully automatically, day and night, seven days a week.
Translated from the Original
Op de Leuvense Gasthuisberg wordt binnenkort een levering van 15.000 geneeskrachtige moleculen verwacht, met de groeten van gewezen Microsoft-baas Bill Gates. Dat schrijft De Standaard vandaag. Op vraag én op kosten van de Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) zal de KU Leuven ze de komende weken testen op hun eventuele werkzaamheid tegen het nieuwe coronavirus. Dat virus veroorzaakt de longziekte COVID-19, die uitgroeit tot een wereldwijde epidemie en waartegen nog geen enkel medicijn bestaat.
