The pioneering effort of Unicamp Task Force, which quickly, at the beginning of the pandemic, set up a robust structure for the production of RT-PCR diagnostic tests, went far beyond the walls of the university in Barão Geraldo. By the end of August, more than 70 tests had been carried out using the kits developed in Campinas. A total of 62 cities were served.
“In June, at the peak of demand for tests, we were doing 3 per day, while the entire State was doing 10. In other words, we accounted for 30% of the daily demand”, says Alessandro dos Santos Farias, immunologist at the Unicamp Biology Institute and one of those responsible for the structure set up at the university that resulted in the development of the tests. According to him, Unicamp has already processed samples from more than 200 cities in São Paulo.
“I usually set goals in my work. And now, our intention is to reach 100 tests, probably by October”, says the researcher. According to Farias, this mark, which corresponds to approximately 10% of the population of the city of Campinas, could be considered significant.
“One hundred thousand tests is a contribution that I consider to be an acceptable level considering the size of our region. When we get there I will be satisfied. This relationship of testing 10% of the population is what Germany did, for example, at a national level. And they were perfect in dealing with the pandemic. They carried out an absolute lockdown and then a lot of tests. They tested 50 people a day”, says the Unicamp immunologist.
The State of São Paulo, until mid-August, had carried out a little more than 611 thousand RT-PCR tests according to official figures from the government of the State of São Paulo. Which means that Unicamp has so far contributed just over 9% of this total.
“It’s good to say that we didn’t reinvent the wheel. Other countries around the world, and research institutes such as Max Planck, in Germany itself, also followed the same paths”, says Farias. For those who think that this entire process at Unicamp is a complete failure, there is an obvious explanation, in addition, of course, to the efforts of the professionals involved in the task force, including postgraduate students and university employees.
“We have a public university, even more so in the case of the State of São Paulo, very well prepared in terms of manpower and research equipment. With this, very quickly, in less than two weeks in March, we were able to provide an effective response with a very low direct investment”, says the IB researcher.
Unicamp's incredible production line for RT-PCR tests cost around R$3 million. “But of course, the training of people and all the equipment, let's put it that way, had already been paid for by the government over time. Even the investment in students had been made and cannot be discarded.”
The reflection of one of the Unicamp professionals responsible for thousands of tests for Covid-19 is even more important in times when investment in state public universities is going through turbulent times. Part of the resources used to develop the tests came from Unicamp's own budget and also from society, through donations, which were fundamental for the standardization of tests and laboratory accreditation.
“Although a pandemic is terrible because of the lives lost and people sick, we are facing a unique life experience. It ends up being an achievement for us, educators, to show our students how their training can be directly applied to a need in society. This process makes these boys understand how important their education is”, says Farias.
The beginning of the entire project, according to the immunologist, arose from scientific discussions that groups at Unicamp involved in genetics, immunology and virology began to have. Professor José Luís Modena, for example, who coordinates a laboratory with a sufficient level of security to work with the coronavirus, opened the possibility for other research groups to use all available infrastructure. But the situation quickly evolved.
“We started to study and discuss scientific issues, but we clearly realized that we would have problems in being able to carry out tests in large quantities. That's when we decided to go down this path. Testing, in our daily lives, is something absolutely trivial. The challenge was the scale itself. Even though I think we started late today, we started before any initiative in Brazil. This is a source of pride for us,” says Farias.
According to the professor, it was weeks of hard work, with few hours of sleep a day and great care to ensure that no one got infected. “We were absolutely afraid that the students would catch it. We only work with graduates. We closed the group to 40 volunteers for logistical reasons. Everyone started thinking about the problem 24 hours a day, sleeping very little, spending about four hours a day at home.”
When times are difficult, Farias recalls, one sentence helps to sum up the commitment of the dozens of collaborators in the task force. “There is no author for this quote, but there is no good sailor on a calm sea. The good side of many people at the university appeared at that moment, whether in the case of tests, the development of PPE or the assembly of parts for respirators. Many fronts have opened. We only know how to do science and all of this started, and will continue, because of science”, says Alessandro Farias.
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