Turkey’s Yunus Emre Institute has launched a scientific hub online to help researchers studying a vaccine for COVID-19.

The portal, covid19.tabipacademy.com, is a subsidiary project of the Academic and Scientific Cooperation Project of Turkey (TABİP), an online science diplomacy hub bringing Turkish and foreign researchers together to create a local, national science inventory for Turkey.

The newly established portal allows all stakeholders who are working hard to find a cure for the coronavirus to follow the most up-to-date scientific studies and technological developments from reliable sources.

The "COVID-19 Hub" offers hundreds of free articles and analyses under various categories. The Yunus Emre Institute aims to contribute to the scientific and technological struggle against the coronavirus with this comprehensive platform by compiling the most up-to-date developments, data and findings from the most trusted and important sources and presenting them to the scientists, doctors, medical equipment manufacturers and all other stakeholders who are in a race against time to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients and prevent the spread of this virus.

The hub aims to help the scientific and technological struggle against the coronavirus gain more momentum. The project presents practices and developments especially from Turkey and with the help of its widespread network around the world from countries such as Germany, South Korea, the United States, Japan and more. The institute says "everyone's contribution is precious for the fight against coronavirus, which is crippling the whole world in the same way. We are looking forward to the opinions, suggestions and contributions from everyone who is willing to support this struggle against time by developing this site further."

Turkish companies and scientists are laboring over locally made COVID-19 test kits while succeeding in isolating the coronavirus.

A company's headquarters at a technology park in the capital Ankara has been working on the development of a locally made kit that will allow diagnosis in less than 60 minutes. This highly sensitive molecular test will be faster than its counterparts. The state-run Defense Industry Presidency endorses the project that uses biosensors and will cost less.

Elsewhere, researchers at a Turkish lab have successfully isolated the virus from a sample retrieved from a coronavirus patient. In the western city of İzmir, scientists at Ege University have announced on Tuesday that they began lab tests of an antigen they designed as a vaccine against the virus.