Weill Cornell Medicine has awarded eight grants of $100,00 each to faculty for a variety of research projects on COVID-19, funded by the institution’s Board of Overseers and additional donors. The grants will support studies aimed at understanding fundamental aspects of the disease, the body’s immune response and social determinants of health that affect COVID-19 outcomes.
One of the faculty members selected as a grant recipient is Julie Magarian Blander, Ph.D., the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Immunology in Medicine, who is also a faculty member of the Jill Roberts Institute for IBD. Immunologists are uniquely poised to make an impact and contribution through their investigation into COVID-19 that may have a global effect on the pandemic. Dr. Blander’s research project, A T cell Biomarker for Protective COVID-19 Immunity, is summarized in following paragraph.
Identifying patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and are immune to future infection is essential to emerging from the pandemic. To do this, scientists must develop reliable tests for immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Though testing for antibodies to the virus is common, so far it is unclear whether they protect against future infection. Dr. Blander and her team will use blood collected from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center healthcare workers who recovered from COVID-19 to find virus-fighting immune cells called CD8 T cells. They will then identify the receptor these T cells use to find and destroy cells infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and try to develop a test to determine if individuals with this receptor are safe from future infections. If they are successful, it could lead to new tests that identify people who are protected from COVID-19 because they have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection or from a previous infection with a similar virus that generates a similar immune response.
To read the full WCM article about all eight grant recipients, please follow the link here.