The Centre for Arbovirus Discovery, Diagnosis, Genomics and Epidemiology (CADDE) brings together academics from Imperial, University of Oxford, and partners in Brazil, and is at the forefront of genomic analysis and the COVID-19 response in Brazil. The Centre is jointly lead by Dr Nuno Faria at Imperial College London and Professor Ester Sabino at the University of São Paulo.
Recently, the director of the São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPESP) Professor Luiz Mello, and Councillor Head of Academic Section at the Embassy of Brazil in London visited the CADDE team at their new laboratory at Imperial College’s White City Campus. Read more here.
The CADDE team builds on experience from the ZiBRA project during the Zika epidemic in 2017, and the yellow fever epidemic in 216-2018 during which genomic surveillance capability in Brazil was mobilised. Funded by the Medical Research Council, this Brazil-UK partnership team used mobile labs to analyse virus outbreak samples and provide important epidemiological information about the spread of these diseases.
Dr Nuno Faria said: “We developed partnerships with national and international research and public health teams including the Brazilian Ministry of Health, COG-UK, the Arctic Network, and the World Health Organisation. These networks helped us to rapidly build sequencing capacity and share findings with partners from all over the world.”
CADDE was launched in 2019 and is housed at Imperial College London’s MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis. This unique partnership between the University of Sao Paulo and several UK based universities is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPESP).
