As the country’s premier medical school that started in 1905, the UP College of Medicine has always been a contributor to the fulfillment of its health goals. Today, several of UPCM’s academic, research, technology, and extension activities which are either in the development or implementation stages are geared towards fighting the battle against the Covid 19 pandemic and ensuring our people’s health and well-being.
The UP College of Medicine initiated measures to protect students and staff from Covid-19 since January and provided alternative learning activities for the former. With the imposition of quarantine, reading assignments and non-graded self-assessments, video demonstration of clinical skills, and other forms of teaching became the norm. Blended learning modules with UP Manila’s Virtual Learning Environment Platform showed that all courses could be accessible 24/7. The PANOPTO software obtained for the college in October proved to be a big help.
With the launching of the UP-PGH Bayanihan Na! Operations Center, 69 volunteer interns responded and are manning the hotline 155-200. Some consultants were put at higher risk among all medical professionals as PGH became a COVID-19 referral hospital. Sadly, a number of UPCM alumni and faculty passed away in the fight against COVID-19.
The early response of UP Manila NIH scientists led by Dr. Raul Destura in developing an RTPCR test together with 20,000 A*STAR Fortitude kits donated by private company Monde Nissin will significantly help in our current efforts. Significantly, some of our faculty members are actively involved in the Inter-Agency Task
Force that was convened to tackle this pandemic. Our epidemiology experts also provided crucial inputs. The College (thru Dr. Ana Melissa Hilvano-Cabungkal) participated in putting out the UP Manila NIH position paper on the “Whole-of-Society Approach”.
A SIBOL (Surgical Innovation and Biotechnology) COVID-19 response team with project leader Dr. Edward Wang was born from a collaboration of engineers and clinicians under the UPCM SIBOL program set up in 2019. This was instrumental in mounting over ten projects (PPEs, telemetry, tracking, and decontamination) that will soon receive additional funding from DOST-PCHRD. There will be ten other projects with the UP College of Engineering (under Dean Ferdie Manegdeg), funded by the UP Engineering Research and Development Foundation headed by its President Rico Trinidad (with about PhP 3.5 million from 87 donors).
As to raising funds, the UP Medical Foundation in partnership with the Ten Outstanding Women for the Nation’s Service, Inc. raised more than PhP 37 million for 500,000 Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) and other needs. The dire lack of PPEs at the start of the pandemic was met by engineers pooling together their 3D printers to make face shields and design ventilators from open source as well as modify neonatal ventilators (Ostreavent) into adult ventilators. The RxBox developed by the NIH’s National Telehealth Center was repurposed and will be used in the PGH isolation rooms.
With UP President Concepcion’s AO dated March 3, 2020 creating a Collaborative Research Structure between UP Diliman and UP Manila, the university’s COVID-19 research team led by Drs. Marissa Alejandria and Aileen Wang prepared many projects with multidisciplinary teams of virologists, data scientists, MD-PhD students, and other experts. They also pushed for the country’s inclusion in the WHO Solidarity Trial, thus gaining access to some of the unavailable therapies for Covid19. One study is the use of convalescent plasma therapy for Covid patients.
My gratitude goes to the members of the Dean’s Management Team, alumni, and friends who helped and continue to help the college in countless ways during this difficult time.
UPCM Dean Charlotte Chiong | Published in UP Manila Healthscape Special COVID-19 Issue No. 2
