Please note this event takes place between 13h00-14h00 BST

Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) is working at the forefront of research and patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Long COVID is a term used to describe people who continue to suffer from fatigue and other symptoms like breathlessness and muscle aches weeks or months after the viral infection has resolved.

In this seminar, two experts will talk about their work on monitoring the spread of long COVID in communities and developing a diagnostic test to detect the disease.

Professor Danny Altmann, from the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Imperial, will talk about his team’s work during the pandemic, characterising the immune response in COVID-19, after vaccination and in long COVID. The team have recently been developing tests to look at antiviral immunity and patterns of autoimmune antibodies in people with long COVID different from those who have fully recovered from COVID-19. While the research is at an early stage, the team hope that this discovery will lead to a diagnostic test that would help distinguish people with long COVID from other chronic conditions and help to find potential treatments for the condition.

Professor Helen Ward, Clinical Professor of Public Health and Director of the Patient Experience Research Centre at Imperial, will talk about leading a study on long COVID. The research involves more than 120,000 people to better understand why some people who are infected with the coronavirus have long COVID while others don’t. The team hopes to find new ways to diagnose, support and effectively treat Long COVID, which may affect up to a quarter of people who have had the virus.

The research forms part of the Imperial-led REACT programme, which is using home testing on hundreds of thousands of volunteers each month to track England’s epidemic, involving almost three million people to date.

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