Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in Tel Aviv signed a historic “Emergency Agreement” with America’s renowned National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct applied scientific and clinical research in the hunt for treatments that will end the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Sheba Medical Center, which was ranked as one of the Top 10 Hospitals in the World by Newsweek Magazine, will supply the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center with blood samples, plasma and the COVID-19 virus itself from infected patients in Israel, as well as all relevant information via a series of clinical trials the hospital is conducting on various treatments from global pharmaceutical companies, as well as its own experimental treatments.
The NIH will support Sheba research on COVID-19 in order to accelerate the process into researching, understanding and finding the most effective treatments and vaccines.
“This collaboration brings together the outstanding clinical acumen of Sheba Medical Center with our state-of-the-art approaches to the scientific investigation of human infectious disease,” said Dr. Daniel Douek, Senior Investigator/Human Immunology Section in the NIH Vaccine Research Center.
“I am certain that we will be able to contribute much to the resolution not only of this current pandemic but also of emerging infections in the future,” he added.
Professor Dror Harats, who chairs the Research and Development Division within Sheba Medical Center’s Health and Research Department stated that “this is an important achievement for Sheba, as we engage with and assist the NIH, the most important research center in the world in finding the proper treatments and eventually a vaccine that will rid the world of this pandemic and save millions of lives in the process.”
Coronavirus has infected some three million people worldwide and has claimed the lives of at least 203,299 people in 210 countries.