There are a few different pieces.
Very early on, Genome Canada participated in a coordinated response that involved a variety of federal research organizations. It was led by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In that competition, we funded a project at the University of Calgary, led by Dr. Dylan Pillai, which looks at rapid diagnostics. That project has now been proven to have great success. They're going through a process now of miniaturizing this diagnostic tool to take it to bedside, and they hope that within the next couple of months it will actually be on the market. So, early-stage stuff was really important.
However, as COVID was spreading and as the community was engaging, we realized that there had to be a large national coordinated effort, which led to the CanCOGeN initiative. This was funded as part of the government's medical countermeasures package, and $40 million was allocated to two projects. The first is to look at patients in Canada and the genetic causes for why some people have terrible reactions and other people seem to be asymptomatic. That's really focused on looking at some interventions through drugs and so on. The other piece is looking at sequencing virus samples from patients across Canada so that we can actually do a better job of understanding the sources of those outbreaks and then tracking their progression.
This is now a big national project, but it's tying into other initiatives, like the immunity task force that was announced at the same time, the NRC initiatives that my colleagues described earlier, and a number of provincial initiatives. Coordination is actually a big piece of what we're doing now across the board.