OCTOBER 2021LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW 19FIMM research focus areas ." The vision behind this approach is to develop an AI algorithm that will be able to predict the most successful treatment for future patients with similar mutations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, FIMM-TC has illustrated its agility and problem-solving capacity in several ways. Genomics Unit has offered free GWAS genotyping of Covid-19 patients for low-income countries as part of the international Covid-19 Host Genetics Initiative with generous support from Illumina. High-Throughput Biomedicine Unit set up a national drug response profiling platform in collaboration with the local university hospital to identify drugs that could be repurposed as Covid-19 therapeutics. Genomics Unit joined forces with a team of virologists at the University of Helsinki and optimised the SARS-Cov-2 whole-genome sequencing process for the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. Explaining how its team helped the local hospital and research community, Dr Kivinen says, "The pandemic resulted in a burst of goodwill between previously competing research institutes and hospitals. Information exchange increased massively when everyone was trying to figure out the best ways to help, and we shared consumables, instruments, and experienced staff." As an example of the R&D work done by many teams during the first months of the pandemic, High Content Imaging and Analysis team miniaturised and multiplexed a serological test to help accelerate Covid-19 antibody testing in Finland. The same team recently set up a laser dissection microscope to select cells of interest from, e.g. tumors for further analysis. Address: Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), PO Box 20, 00014 University of Helsinki, FinlandWebsite: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/infrastructures/fimm-technology-centreSwitchboard: +358 (0) 2941 911Our teams are able to develop customised approaches for our users and provide end-to-end expertise that can be hard to access elsewhere
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