The Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases (Italian: ''Istituto nazionale per le malattie infettive "L. Spallanzani"'') is an infectious disease hospital in the Italian city of

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

. The institute is named for the eighteenth-century Italian biologist

Lazzaro Spallanzani Lazzaro Spallanzani (; 12 January 1729 – 11 February 1799) was an Italian Catholic priest (for which he was nicknamed Abbé Spallanzani), biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily function ...

. It is the Italian national reference center for Ebola patients. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

, the Spallanzani Institute was the first research centre in Europe to isolate the

genomic sequence In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), the respiratory illness responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had a ...

and upload it to

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

. The team was composed of Maria Rosaria Capobianchi, Francesca Colavita, and Concetta Castilletti. The institute is working with biotech company ReiThera to test a COVID-19 vaccine candidate called GRAd-COV2, which is based on a modified

gorilla Gorillas are herbivorous, predominantly ground-dwelling great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus ''Gorilla'' is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or fi ...

adenovirus

vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

References

External links

* http://www.inmi.it/ Hospitals in Rome Rome Q. XII Gianicolense Biosafety level 4 laboratories Medical research institutes in Italy {{italy-struct-stub