Z21 project ready to fight COVID-19

Together with Scientists from Medicine and Biological Sciences and University spin out company, Synairgen, TopMD will lead molecular phenotyping in a €14m EU-funded international consortium for COVID-19 advanced diagnostics.

TopMD co-founders, James Schofield, Lecturer in Systems Biomedicine and Paul Skipp, Associate Professor in Proteomics will work with a number of other University of Southampton researchers and academics in leading the DRAGON project.

Aimed at creating a patient-centred system to enable more rapid and precise diagnosis and prognosis, molecular phenotyping uses the quantitative measurement of thousands of biomolecules (genes and proteins) to measure biological pathway activity to better understand diseases, leading to improved diagnostic and treatment approaches.

TopMD was created by a team of scientists and mathematicians at the University of Southampton to dramatically improve precision and accuracy of disease diagnosis. The spinout promises to revolutionise healthcare by allowing high resolution investigation of molecular mechanisms underlying disease, and therefore enabling development of targeted treatments for application in precision medicine.