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hospital,” Jackson says, “and what the range of symptoms is, and risk factors and so
forth for hospitalization. But with a lot of respiratory viruses — we suspect COVID will
be the same — there are many more people that are sick but don’t go in the hospital.
But it still has meaningful impact on quality of life and ability to work and so forth.”
Across the Cascades at Washington State University, Professor Santanu Bose has
worked for years to understand why some viral infections of the respiratory tract result
in death.
His discovery, since patented by the university, involves the A9 protein. This protein
signals an overblown inflammatory reaction in the airways that fills lungs with fluid,
destroys tissue and leads to fatalities, the university reports.
Bose and his colleagues developed a treatment for these immune system overreactions
that has since been licensed to a Canadian biotech company for further development.
“Our goal now at WSU,” Bose explained in a news release, “is to immediately study
the A9 antibody with the COVID-19 virus to ensure that neutralizing the A9 protein
is effective in decreasing the inflammatory response and severity of the pneumonia,
which should translate to increased overall patient survival.”
Washington’s national lab is in the fight as well. Biochemist Garry Buchko at Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory is working to better understand the 27 proteins
contained in the coronavirus.
“We’re looking at the individual proteins from coronavirus to determine their threedimensional
structures, which provide blueprints for drug design,” Buchko said in a
PNNL video report.
The swirl of news and kitchen table discussions over the pandemic often center
around this question: When will life return to normal? Now, as summer turns to fall,
many observers say it simply won’t — but that a safe and reliable vaccine can help
society move forward.
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is at the forefront of this
work. There, virologist and past President and Director Dr. Larry Corey will lead
an operations center for the COVID-19 Prevention Network. This collaboration was
additional information
Washington State University research
https://news.wsu.edu/2020/05/14/
wsu-researchers-look-head-off-covid-19s-deadly-pneumonia
University of Washington research
www.washington.edu/news/2020/05/18/covid-19-uw-study-reportsstaggering-death-rate-in-us-among-those-infected-who-show-symptoms
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
www.fredhutch.org/en/coronavirus-overview.html
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
www.kpwashingtonresearch.org/news-and-events/
blog/2020/5-questions-influenza-and-covid-19-epidemiologist
“When effective vaccines for
COVID-19 come along, we can
start going back to normalcy.
But I hope that it would not
really be the same normalcy
as before, where we have
been reluctant to fully value
the contributions and need for
public health investments in our
communities. I hope the new
normal would appreciate and
invest in monitoring, preventing,
and educating about the perils of
infectious diseases.”
— Anirban Basu, health economics professor
and director of the Comparative Health
Outcomes, Policy and Economics Institute at
the University of Washington.
summer 2020
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