EVIDENT: activities and timeline
The first EVIDENT team arrived in Guinea in December 2014. Since then, a substantial amount of laboratory capacity has been built at Donka Hospital in Conakry which as of now, includes multiparameter flow cytometry, class III cabinet ('glovebox'), ELISPOT, and next generation sequencing (MinION). In addition, in a second laboratory in Guéckédou, EVIDENT researchers have performed the first ever ELISPOT assay in West Africa. EVIDENT is also supporting several clinical trials in close collaboration with other partners in the field such as WHO, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), African Union and Guinea Ministry of Health. This includes the establishment of good clinical practice compliant blood sample processing with Class II hoods that is currently supporting the WHO/MSF Phase III Ebola vaccine clinical trial in Conakry.
In addition to gathering relevant immunological data on human Ebola virus disease, the teams are involved on training of our African colleagues and building on site capacity for research on the immunology of hemorrhagic fever viruses. Our next EVIDENT Team (4) will be deployed in April 29th, 2015.
