![]() ![]() Furthermore, the article explores how Iceland and deCODE’s resources assisted in the country’s preparedness, agility, and robustness in confronting the virus. This article looks at and argues for how a public–private partnership between a government and a private company helped to develop a novel approach to screening, testing, and sequencing a virus to avoid a collapse in a healthcare system and permit a country to drop COVID-19 restrictions. This is our contribution to the battle” (Kelly, 2020). ![]() As deCODE’s founder and CEO, Kari Stefansson, said, “We just came to help the system this was all hands-on deck moment. On March 13, 2020, deCODE repurposed their genetics laboratory and took over most of the screening and testing from Iceland’s University Hospital. Established in 1996 and later acquired by the USA biopharmaceutical company Amgen in 2012, deCODE had become well-known around the world for creating one of the first major human genetics databases for the purpose of studying the identification and prevention of diseases. Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO, was however known for his generosity but he, on behalf of deCODE had given the University Hospital the first Position Emission Tomography (PET/CT) in 2018 worth 800 million (Decode Genetics, 2017). It was, as well, the only company with the knowledge and equipment to step in and provide aid of this sort. This was done without any request from the Government and was estimated to cost the company 1,2 billion Icelandic Kronur (ISK) a month (Jonasson, 2020a). The private company, deCODE Genetics, offered its services for free to the Government of Iceland to screen, test and further gain an understanding of the virus. Additionally, the country had focused on the development of the tourism sector from 2010 to 2020, seen by many to be one of the key factors in reviving the economy. A decade later in 2020, Iceland had established more robust governance mechanisms in both public and private sectors. The country’s institutions had all been on a long road of rebuilding trust after the financial crisis of 2008–2010, which had caused a collapse of the banking system, currency, and economy, resulting in a period of political turmoil. The Government of Iceland and local authorities set about protecting the nation's health system through a series of actions. Several countries around the world had already closed their borders to stop the transmission of the disease (Directorate of Health, 2021a). Dr.On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, the virus was in the early stages of spreading in Iceland. Kári Stefánsson The Genetics of Iceland and its Gaelic Motherhood Our transmedia project has more resources including a short video from our chat with Kari The research data is here: /publications/ Here's the article that prompted us to go further : In this small population of just 330,000 people (it was only about 150,000 until the mid 20th Century) genetics and ancestry is a national interest where people like to trace their line back to a character in the Icelandic Sagas.īut while the Sagas were written a few centuries after the settlement the deCode genetics work, on both the modern population, and ancient skeletons gives a scientific window on a thousand year old story. But the deCode Genetics research also shows how the isolation of the Icelandic people, for hundreds of years, has shaped their genetic code so that the modern Icelandic people are quite different from their original Norwegian and Gaelic roots. The sequencing of the Icelandic population's DNA by deCODE genetics has also revealed more about who were the original settlers of Iceland, showing over 60% of the female and 20% of the male DNA came from gaelic people. This population approach has served as a model for national genome projects around the world. His work has focused on how genomic diversity is generated and on the discovery of sequence variants impacting susceptibility to common diseases. In Iceland he has pioneered the use of population-scale genetics to understand variation in the sequence of the human genome. Kári Stefánsson is an Icelandic neurologist and founder and CEO of the Reykjavik-based biopharmaceutical company deCODE genetics. ![]()
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