Bill Murphy / Lifespan
Rapid Responders
From ICUs to the labs , Brown faculty go all in to help COVID-19 patients .
WHEN COVID-19 STARTED TO MAKE ITS WAY INTO THE US IN EARLY 2020 , Jeff Bailey , MD , PhD , an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University , thought back to his time in Liberia .
In 2013 and 2014 , Bailey responded to the West African Ebola outbreak . “ People presumed things were getting done by others because they seemed like the obvious things to do ,” he says . “ We later found out that everyone was thinking about the obvious things , but no one was doing them .”
Bailey , who is a practicing physician in transfusion medicine and coagulation at The Miriam and Rhode Island hospitals , didn ’ t want the same thing to happen when a different pandemic reached their doorstep . So since March , he has headed the COVID research task force for Brown , coordinating
BY JEN A . MILLER the University-wide effort to better understand , treat , and manage COVID-19 .
“ People across Brown started to think ‘ how can I bring my expertise to bear , and how could that be impactful ?’” he says .
As the task force reviewed proposals for COVID-related research , not only did they look for projects that might seem obvious to researchers and academics at The Warren Alpert Medical School , but they stretched across the University to review and then fund COVID-19 investigations in disciplines like engineering and computer science .
Brown researchers worked to create the
Lifespan / Brown COVID-19 Biobank based at Rhode Island Hospital . Patients coming into emergency departments there and at The Miriam were asked to donate blood samples for research to create the biorepository . Researchers statewide can apply to use samples from patients who tested positive or negative for the virus . The project worked so well that Brown helped an organization in Nebraska set up a similar biorepository plan .
In the School of Engineering , researchers designed ventilators using 3D printing and off-the-shelf parts that could be made quickly and locally . A group from the Department of Computer Science developed an artificial intelligence platform to differentiate COVID-19 from viral pneumonia on a chest CT scan and use that information to identify early-stage patients who are likely to transition to severe COVID-19 .
A team from the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics established an interinstitutional informatics infrastructure to support COVID-19 research in Rhode Island through electronic health data , digital health technology , and data science techniques . Another group from the Department of Molecular Biology , Cell Biology , and Biochemistry worked to develop a sample unit for a potential COVID-19 home testing kit .
COMPASSIONATE CARE When Brown researchers joined two international studies of convalescent plasma , they not only helped the world ’ s scientific community better understand how to treat COVID-19 , they brought lifesaving treatments to Rhode Island patients .
The idea of using convalescent plasma has been around since the 1918 influenza
The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University 222 Richmond Street , Providence , Rhode Island med @ brown . edu med . brown . edu
50 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JANUARY 2021