Question

New Inventions and Discoveries during Pandemic

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

SUBSCRIBE

2020 Top 10 Innovations

HomeArchiveDecember 2020Features

2020 Top 10 Innovations

From a rapid molecular test for COVID-19 to tools that can characterize the antibodies produced in the plasma of patients recovering from the disease, this year’s winners reflect the research community’s shared focus in a challenging year.

The Scientist Staff

Dec 1, 2020

222

ABOVE: © THE SCIENTIST STAFF

We know the old saw: necessity is the mother of invention. Well, 2020 has shown us that a global pandemic is one serious mother. Typically, our Top 10 Innovations competition focuses on laboratory technologies, tools designed to plumb the mysteries of basic biology. But as biologists turned their sights to understanding SARS-CoV-2, the innovation landscape changed accordingly, with new tools developed and existing technologies bent to address the pandemic. So this year at The Scientist, our annual contest incorporates inventions aimed at understanding and ultimately solving the COVID-19 problem.

Among our independent judges’ picks for 2020’s Top 10 Innovations were core laboratory technologies—such as a single-cell proteome analyzer and a desktop gene synthesizer—alongside pandemic-focused products, including a rapid COVID-19 test, a tool that can capture antibody profiles from the blood plasma of convalescing coronavirus patients, and a platform for characterizing glycans in the spike protein that studs the surface of SARS-CoV-2. The competition among stellar submissions was so steep that this year’s Top 10 actually contains 12 products, thanks to a couple of ties.

As challenging as 2020 has been for all of us, this tumultuous year has given birth to promising products and approaches for elucidating the complex world of biology. And even more than that, 2020 has shown that the scientific community, when faced with a shared problem, can rise to the challenge and come together to refocus, research, and innovate. Here, The Scientist presents the tools and technologies that make up this year’s Top 10 Innovations.  

AbCellera Celium™

ABCELLERA

In late March, biotech firm AbCellera hosted a call with 40 researchers to review the data they’d collected on potential antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Using AbCellera’s high-throughput microfluidics and single-cell analysis tools to probe samples of COVID-19 patients, the company’s team had deciphered the genetic sequences encoding hundreds of antibodies that might treat the disease. Sifting through all of that data by hand was tedious, though, so the team fed it into Celium, a data visualization tool that intersects more than a million high-quality data points for those antibodies to reveal which ones might work best in patients as a potential therapy. In real time, on the call, the researchers used Celium to probe those relationships and home in on the LY-CoV555 antibody that, months later, entered clinical trials as a possible COVID-19 treatment, says Maia Smith, lead of data visualization at AbCellera and creator of Celium. “I think that kind of says it all.”