Questions & Answers: Office of Research UCSF Campus-wide COVID-19 Research Town Hall
March 26, 2020
Specific Project Focus | Research Related Comments | Institutional Questions
Specific Research Project Focus Questions
Dr. Nevan Krogan presented work at the Town Hall that is in-part represented in a recently published article in BioRxIV. Please find it here.
Q: To Dr. Nevan Krogan: Any idea on how quickly some of these candidates could be rolled out to the population, or how widely? Are these expensive or readily available drugs?
Q: To Dr. Nevan Krogan: Is there a difference in the interactome between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV/common coronaviruses that explains its lethality?
Q: To Dr. Nevan Krogan: Did remdesivir come up in Dr. Brian Shiochet's in silico screen? What are the next steps for these compounds? How long will it take for them to get tested in enough models/platforms for them to potentially be used in hospitals/clinical trials?"
Q: Where can we get COVID19 replicon (cDNA) for various gene cloning purposes?
Q: To Dr. Nevan Krogan: You talked about a ferret model for the coronavirus. Modeling the virus also suggests that it will bind ACE2 in cats and dogs. Is there anything known about coronavirus infection of these pets?
Q: For Dr. Chaz Langelier: How amenable are current research initiatives towards potential COVID-19 mutations as it spreads through the global population? Is there genetic tracing to determine if different COVID-19 strains are developing in different regions?
Q: For Dr. Charles Chiu: Are the 7 novel substitutions in COVID-19 located in specific region(s) or distributed throughout the entire genome?
Q: For Dr. Charles Chiu: Can you detect the origin of SARS2 from UCSF and other northern CA patients?
Q: For Dr. Chaz Langelier: For the airway transcriptome data, how is the host sample obtained?
Q: For Dr. Chaz Langelier: What is known about false negative rate of current PCR-based testing, and how does that affect clinical practice, epidemiological models, and public health considerations?
Q: For Dr. Chaz Langelier: What is the status of testing/tracking immunity?
Q: Is there evidence that post-corona infection someone develops an immunity to secondary infections, or is it too soon to know this?
Q: For Dr. Colin Zamecnik, re: phage display detection of exposure, what’s known so far about the possibility of reinfection by SARS-CoV-2?
Q: To Dr. Colin Zamecnik: What do you think of the idea of using plasma or IgM from recovered patients to infuse into those with severe disease?
Q: Any thoughts on using inhibitors to TMPRSS2, based on this recent paper?
Q: Which lab(s) is doing lung organoid studies?
Q: Would collection of samples from patients who died potentially allow assessment of whether they died from failing to mount the correct adaptive response? (And other lessons.)
Q: Are there any efforts to distinguish between COVID-19 disease that manifests first with GI symptoms vs respiratory vs systemic (fever)?
Q: To Mark Pletcher: Related to the COVID-19 Citizen Science study. Can people from other countries join the Covid-19 Citizen Study? How can they do that? Can the COVID-19 Citizen Science project survey medication data:
Q: What do we know about vaccine development and deployment?
Q: Can we get SARS Cov-2 virus to perform experiments at UCSF in the near future?
Q: What is the status of mesenchymal stromal cell study?
Q: Is anyone looking at AAT levels in patients? This is Alpha-1 Antitripsin associated with AATD. AAT downregulates elastase expressed by neutrophils engaged with severe lung disease and thereby reduces damage to lung tissue. AAT in normal ranges in concentration by a ~3:1 ratio. Could patients with less AAT be subject to more severe lung damage from COVID? Human plasma derived AAT for infusion is used to treat AATD.
Q: Do you think COVID-19 affects other organs such as brain long-term?
Q: Could COVID-19 infection in pregnant women lead to psychiatric disorders in offspring?
Q: Do scientists know how long the virus survives on different surfaces?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: how good is the data that three days post infection, one begins viral shedding/ being transmissibie?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: When you mentioned that the number of ICU beds occupied will be constant over time. Did you mean that it’s reasonable to assume, if the true number of cases is the same over time but testing increases over time, the number of confirmed positive cases increases over time?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: Based on the actual data, do we end up decreasing the total number of cases by flattening the curve? Or do we expect the same number of cases, just distributed over a longer time, as the non-representative graphs seem to suggest?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: Can you provide the link for the last “GeoTagging” and self-reporting study on daily basis dataset that you spoke about?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: In order to get the population back to school and work, we need to know what proportion of the population is becoming immune in prospective fashion. Can you speak to this?
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: are you using data from other cities, such as New York City, to expedite the development of your models?"
Q: For Dr. George Rutherford: How did COVID19 turn into a pandemic when other coronavirus diseases did not? What are the chances or likelihood that there will be another coronavirus pandemic (and how often)?
Research Related Comments
C: Humanized mice constructed with fetal tissue contain vascularized lung implants, either with or without human immune systems, have been shown to be infectable with coronaviruses. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has suspended federally funded research that uses human fetal tissue. An appeal for an exception is awaiting decision, not by NIH or HHS, but by the White House Domestic Policy Council. In our work to be granted an exception, it would be helpful to identify UCSF investigators or their collaborators outside of UCSF whose work would benefit from access to these humanized mice.
C: We are working on candidate methods for sanitizing N95 respirators safely using common household kitchen items. We need help with efficacy testing. Is there a virologist with access to SARS-CoV-2 in this virtual room that can help us?
Institutional Questions
Q: What about partnering with the Bio/pharma industry?
Q: If there are multiple research groups trying to address the same questions, what will be the process to choose which group gets priority to gain permission to initiate research in the lab at this time of restrictions?"
Q: How can we ensure that patients are not overwhelmed with numerous requests to participate in research studies related to COVID? Can there be a unified informed consent document (rather than multiple individual ones for separate studies?). How can we better centralize all the various research efforts to work in a coordinated way, and make sure the process is transparent, fair, and prioritizes the most important research directions?
Q: Who can UCSF Fresno get in touch with to collaborate on some of the research being done at main campus?
Q: Is there a formal mechanism to find collaborators? For example, I have an idea. Would anyone at UCSF like to team up with us? Will UCSF organize a path to connect investigators?
Q: Many students and staff have been asking about volunteer opportunities to help the campus and community during the COVID-19 outbreak. What are the efforts being coordinated at UCSF, including both clinical and non-clinical roles, depending on your interest and training?