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Professor of Molecular Oncology, Mark Boyd, who also holds the roles of Supra Theme Lead for Science and Scholarship, and the Theme Lead for Science and Medicine at the School, has been working with coronavirus swab samples at the Virus Isolation Lab at Alderley Park. He told us what it's like to be working with the virus.
Professor Boyd is based on Workstation One in the Virus Isolation Lab. This is the biggest bottleneck in the process. This step involves un-bagging samples with potentially live virus in them, where the team use a 96 well plate to get the sample ready for the next step of the process. It's one of the few steps of the process which hasn't yet been automated.
Whilst Professor Boyd has spent the last 20 years working in Oncology he also has a wealth of experience in Virology. He worked at The Institute of Cancer Research, London specifically working on HIV 1. This provided many years of experience in handling, quantifying, manipulating and genetically altering viruses in order to study them.
"I really felt like I should be trying to do something to contribute under these extraordinary circumstances. I felt slightly useless in a way because our laboratory has been closed, and I felt like this was something that I could do to contribute to the overall effort to deal with this rather unpleasant virus" said Professor Boyd, regarding his recent work at the Lab.
This is very different from our research environment. Usually, you rarely do the same thing more than a few times, and here you're looking for consistency, and when you're doing it you're really trying to concentrate, because behind each one of these samples is a person, and you want to make sure that every person has the chance to get their test results, because they're going to care very much about that. So it's a totally different experience.
"It's very satisfying in a way, even though I am only a tiny part of a much bigger operation. It's been fascinating as well, because it's a totally different type of work to what I'm actually used to, because it's obviously large numbers of samples being processed in a rather repetitious way, which is pretty different from what we normally do.
"I've been incredibly impressed by the people I've been working with, many of whom are rather younger than me. I've been incredibly impressed with their professionalism and dedication, it's been great to see, so I have enjoyed the experience.
"The best thing about working in the Virus Isolation Lab is the sense that you're doing something worthwhile, trying to contribute to a national effort to do something very important".