The UT Health RGV Clinical Lab was awarded the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) partnership grant in order to increase COVID-19 research in vulnerable areas of South Texas.
The CTSA partnership is part of a multi-institutional grant that was awarded to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston who then partnered with other system schools and institutions such as UT Health Science Center at Tyler and UT Health RGV itself.
Director of COVID-19 operations at the UT Health RGV Clinical Lab John Thomas says the grant is about $900,000 and will be used to conduct testing in “underserved” areas of South Texas, where COVID-19 tests may not be readily available to the community.
According to a news release from UTRGV, UT Health RGV Clinical Lab will be conducting testing over the next two years and will cover the region south of San Antonio. UT Health Science Center at Houston will cover east Texas and the UT Health Science Center at Tyler will cover the northwest.
Thomas elaborates on some of the goals this grant is being used to achieve.
“Our main focus is to try and get people who haven’t been tested, populations that have not been tested, tested, and try to identify what are the factors that have led these populations to not get tested,” Thomas said.
Thomas also went on to explain their strategy on how they are going to address these populations.
“We will send out a small mobile collection team that will then go to these communities, … collect nasal pharyngeal swab samples from the people in these communities. This small mobile testing team…will document all the patient information [and] demographic information they can get,” he said.
Thomas said that once the samples arrive at the clinical lab, they will be tested for COVID-19 and later discuss the information with the other partners of the grant to answer the question of why some populations may be more or less likely to get tested.
According to Thomas, the funds from the grant is estimated to be distributed within the next month.
UT Health RGV will begin the testing in December.
This is Rodolfo Alvarado for Vaquero News
