The UAB to participate in Orfeu, a COVID-19 mass screening programme

The Government of Catalonia gave the go-ahead to begin Phase 2 of the COVID-19 Mass Screening Programme based on the PCR capacities of the network of knowledge agents in Catalonia (Orfeu Programme). This new phase will incorporate specialised facilities from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the University of Barcelona (UB), the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) and the EURECAT (through its Centre for Omic Sciences, COS), under the coordination of the UAB. The expansion of the Orfeu Programme will represent the capacity to conduct 139,000 additional tests to the already 170,000 conducted in the first phase, during a period of six weeks and with a new investment of 1.2 million euros.

With the objective of maximising the contribution of laboratories and the safety of workers participating in Phase 2, the chosen platforms include automated systems, high performance PCR machines, and P3 or P2 biosafety spaces for the different stages of the analytical process. As in the development of the first phase of the Orfeu Programme, the universities worked in regionals nodes with their hospitals of reference and in collaboration with Catalan Healthcare Institute, the Health Services and the Ministry for Health.

UAB Involvement

The UAB will offer the laboratories of its Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) and its Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, with three RNA extraction and PCR preparation machines, P3 biosafety spaces to deactivate the virus and prepare samples, as well as real-time PCR machines distributed throughout the different teaching centres of the university, which will allow efficiently conducting 1,500 PCRs daily diàries while guaranteeing the traceability of the samples.

Orfeu Programme

On 7 April 2020, the Government of Catalonia passed the Orfeu Programme for the mass screening of COVID-19 with the objective of complementing the health system's capacity to screen for SARS-CoV-2. The programme based on the PCR capacities of the country's network of knowledge agents intended, in its first phase, to conduct 170,000 new tests in six weeks, with the possibility of conducting more tests later on. In this initial phase, three CERCA centres from Catalonia's research network were incorporated to conduct the PCR tests: the Institute for Biomedical Research (IRB), the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), which had already begun to offer COVID-19 screening services. During these past weeks, the screening tests have been deployed and in the next few days the centres will begin to function until they reach their full performance capacity in this first phase.

The creation of the Orfeu Programme responds to the essential need of COVID-19 mass screenings during both this quarantine period and throughout the deconfinement phases, and should be conducted in a coordinated and progressive manner. For this reason, Catalonia sees the need to be prepared to conduct mass screenings to complement those offered by the public health system. The COVID-19 mass screenings are particularly important to safeguard the health of people during the deconfinement phase.