Researchers at Queens University are working alongside companies to determine how best to respond to the various problems the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused in Canada.

Two projects associated with Queens have received over $4 million through the Digital Technology Superclusters COVID-19 program: Project Looking Glass and Project ACTT.

The program focuses on funding technologies that support the health system, community health, safe living, diagnostics and therapeutics, and emergency COVID-19 response. It has provided a total of $60 million in funding to various projects.

The Superclusters initiative demonstrates what we can do when we harness the collective strengths of industry, academia. and research, Kimberly Woodhouse, vice-principal (research), told the Whig-Standard. Queens is a key partner in helping to grow these companies and collaborations and providing vital expertise that will help in our national efforts to combat COVID-19 through strength in digital technology.

Led by Kings Distributed Systems (KDS), Looking Glass: Protecting Canadians in a Return to Community is building a platform that will use predictive modelling to analyze pandemic policies and determine which ones are most effective.

Policy makers will be able to input possible actions and clearly see the potential outcomes, in terms of both public health and the economy. They will also be able to use the tools interactive map, which links demographic, economic, and COVID-19 case report data to specific census regions.

Queens mathematics researchers Troy Day and Felicia Magpantay will contribute leading epidemiological models to the project.

Queens Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) has provided some of the projects industry partners with supports, including the facilitation of a pilot project with Queens Centre for Advanced Computing. One of these industry partners, Limestone Analytics, is led by Queens professor Bahman Kashi.

With partners and contributors from a range of institutions and industry across Canada, this diverse collaboration with develop Looking Glass into a powerful tool to forecast not only COVID-19 infection rates from actions such as reopening schools, but also other critical public health issues like vaccination campaigns and managing tick-borne disease, the university wrote in a statement.

Led by Canexia Health, Project ACTT: Access to Cancer Testing and Treatment in Response to COVID-19 focuses on expanding access to cancer testing, which has been delayed through the pandemic as a result of limits placed on non-COVID care.

The project will use a minimally invasive DNA test as an alternative to surgical tissue biopsies. The test takes a blood sample from the patient and analyzes it to detect fragments of DNA shed by cancer tumours.

This method functions as a remote delivery substitute for cancer biopsies, thus minimizing patient exposure to COVID-19. It may also provide solutions for testing those in rural or remote areas.

The projects principal investigator is Queens pathology and molecular medicine researcher Harriet Feilotter, who is also a member of the Queens Cancer Research Institutes Division of Cancer Biology and Genetics.

In response to COVID-19 many Queens researchers have been building on their industry partnerships to help rapidly pivot and mobilize their research to address some of the many complex problems posed by the pandemic, the University wrote. Many collaborations have been formed to help not only respond to immediate issues, but to also look to the future as we assess the crisiss impact throughout society.

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Queens partners with industry for COVID research - The Kingston Whig-Standard