Visitor of the Week: Prashant Hariharan

Meet Prashant Hariharan of Wayne State University! The PhD Candidate is in his third year of a Biomedical Engineering program and a member of Dr. Carolyn Harris’ research group that uses tissue engineering to study and treat Hydrocephalus. Prashant joins us this week at the 2021 Brain Barriers virtual meeting where he presented a poster titled “Choroid Plexus-on-a-Chip―Characterizing a microfluidic model of cerebrospinal fluid secretion to study inflammation and hypersecretion associated with hydrocephalus”. He has presented a poster before but had this to say of his experience presenting during the CSHL Brain Barriers meeting:

This conference was certainly one of the most positive poster presentations experiences of my PhD. I had more people stop by to ask me interesting questions and give me suggestions than ever before at previous conferences. This was partially because almost every project could be associated with my own in some way. This thematic closeness of the CSH-BBB community was a unique and valuable experience!

Tell us about your research.
My thesis research involves the development of an “organ-on-a-chip” model of the choroid plexus, the part of the brain responsible for secretion of the cerebrospinal fluid. This model can be described as “a miniature, functioning diorama” of the choroid plexus tissue built using cells to study how injury affects fluid secretion in the brain.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
When I started my PhD program, I was studying the failure of ventricular catheters used to treat patients with hydrocephalus. This involved building a biobank of failed catheters collected from patients, some of who were only a few months old. This experience compelled me to research non-surgical treatment strategies, specifically drugs that could alter fluid secretion at the choroid plexus. Subsequently, I proposed building the organ-on-a-chip model to my mentor Dr. Harris and she graciously gave me room to explore the idea.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
As cliché as it may sound, my parents and my maternal grandfather are the biggest inspirations in my scientific journey. My mother was an organic chemist who sacrificed her career to support our family; she never passes up an opportunity to teach me the botanical name of a plant or to refresh my memory with bird names and cloud types. My father and my grandfather share a passion for preserving the environment and a voracious appetite for scientific literature. Together, they gave me a sense of wonder about biology and science in general.

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
During my PhD, I hope to validate my organ-on-a-chip model of the choroid plexus, and test my hypothesis pertaining to how inflammation affects barrier integrity and fluid secretion. I also hope to answer pivotal questions about the obstruction of ventricular catheters that may help reduce the failure rate. These are very small steps towards improving the quality of life for hydrocephalus patients.

After my PhD, I aspire to add complexity and expand my organ-on-a-chip model to enable researchers studying hydrocephalus, Alzheimer’s, cancer cell transcytosis, circadian rhythms, or drug delivery to the brain, to test their hypothesis quickly and cost-effectively.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
Ideally, in 5 years, I see myself in the middle of a post-doctoral program where I am diving deeper into understanding the choroid plexus using new and interesting techniques while also improving my organ-on-a-chip model and broadening its applications. 

What do you love most about being a researcher?
There are three aspects of being a researcher that I find immensely satisfying:

1. Working to improve on a skill (such as writing or giving a lecture) and making tangible improvements after years of work.

2. Iterative problem solving that ends with finding an “elegant”, simple solution.

3. Working on projects where I can move seamlessly from the lab bench to reading literature, with both activities informing each other.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
Being a biomedical engineer and a newcomer to the choroid plexus research community, it was not clear to me if my model would add value. I was looking for experts who could opine on my work and guide me in the right direction. When my mentor Dr. Harris first brought this meeting to my attention, I noticed that many of the leading researchers within my area of interest were attending this conference. I was eager to interact with them and take their feedback on my model.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
There are a lot of unanswered questions with regards to the role of choroid plexus and glymphatic spaces in different pathophysiologies; an understanding of how fluid moves across different compartments in the brain is still elusive. Personally, my model could find a wider application in the study of different brain barriers and could pair very well with other techniques currently being used if I could find a way to incorporate primary cells from animals of different ages as well as cells from a pluripotent source.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
My advice to anyone who may attend a future meeting would be to go through the schedule before the day of the meeting and pick out the talks and posters that are of interest. Trying to sit through every talk will tire you out and reduce your capacity to absorb or process information by the last day.

Show up with questions about your own project that have been difficult to answer and network with others doing similar research to figure out how they tackled the same issues. This may seem like an obvious thing to do but you’d be surprised how much inertia there is in doing this.

Take advantage of the ‘PI Chats’ sessions to network with PIs who may be of interest to you but do not rely solely on these sessions to interact with PIs. Reach out to them before the meeting, introduce yourself and frame your questions clearly so they can help you.

Images provided by Prashant Hariharan.

Thank you to Prashant for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Visitor of the Week: Esmaeil Amiri

Meet Esmaeil Amiri of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG)! The NRC Research Associate works in a collaborative team between Dr. Olav Rueppell’s research group at UNCG and Dr. David R. Tarpy’s research group at North Carolina State University. Esmaeil was with us this week at the Biology & Genomics of Social Insects virtual meeting where he presented a poster entitled “Ontogeny of Immune Responses in Honey Bee Queens to IAPV Infection”. This is the second time Esmaeil has attended this meeting – he participated in the 2018 conference, giving a talk on “Trans-generational Effects in Honeybees―Focus on the Egg”.

Tell us about your research.
I am an integrative biologist studying honey bees: My research program combines honey bee management activities with molecular laboratory techniques and bioinformatics tools to study a) the dynamics of viruses and immune mechanisms in the complex social network of honey bees, and b) transgenerational effects and maternal investment in honey bees in response to environmental stressors.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
Well, let me go back to the time I was an undergraduate student pursing my study in Animal Science while I was a beekeeper managing around 250-300 colonies. As a beekeeper and naïve undergraduate student, I was really fascinated by the honey bee colony structure and especially the capability of the queen to produce 1500-2000 eggs per day and live much longer than any other colony member.

While I was pursuing my Master’s studies in Animal Breeding and Genetics, I found that current breeding and selection foster economical traits to the detriment of disease resistance. This was concurrent with the description of a novel honey bee health problem called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD); therefore, I decided to pursue the study of honey bee viruses as one of the main drivers of colony mortality during my PhD. My beekeeping expertise came in very handy during this time. Since then, I have sought for my research to contribute to our understanding of the ongoing pollinator health crisis and to improve apicultural practices. Honey bees are the most important crop pollinators and are also an attractive eusocial scientific model to study fundamental scientific topics.

Over the past years, my scientific interests have evolved, and I have become interested in expanding my research to understand transgenerational disease effects; including vertical pathogen transmission, as well as immune priming to enhance offspring immunity. In addition, I have become interested in life history theories and have started to study maternal investment in honey bees.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
Since I can remember, I have had a curious mind that directed me to travel internationally to several countries in different continents where I experienced multiple academic cultures. During my academic career, I met with many scientists and have been supervised by several great mentors in my research field. Every one of them inspired my scientific career in one way or another, and I am very much thankful for them. On a personal level, my mother and my wife have been the biggest inspiration for my scientific journey.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
I am passionate about pollinators, so I have decided to stay in academia and continue my research in the field of pollinator health. My research area is recognized and accepted by my peers; therefore in five years, I can imagine myself as a university professor, managing an integrative and innovative research program that contributes to move our research field toward achieving the goal of a sustainable apicultural industry.  

What do you love most about being a researcher?
The science community is very dynamic, and the vast majority is motivated to share ideas and collectively contribute to move the science forward and to help understand the nature around us. As scientists, we are walking through the unknowns to make them be known and, many times, we face difficulties and obstacles. I mostly enjoy discovering methods and ways to solve problems by generating new knowledge that then becomes a part of the existing body of science.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
In 2018, my supervisor Dr. Olav Rueppell suggested I participate and present my research findings at this meeting. During the 2018 iteration, I enjoyed being part of a larger scientific community passionate about understanding the many different aspects of social insects. I found it interesting because it enabled me to get out of my honey bee research zone and see myself as part of a bigger group studying other social insects such as ants, wasps, and termites. The excitement from my first participation in 2018 encouraged me to join again this year and I have gotten the chance to learn even more from the oral and poster presentations.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
I gained many research ideas and learned about new methods to analyze genomic data that I am sure will enrich my future research projects. I also got the chance to meet with several other scientists and hope our discussion will pave the way for future collaborations.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
Since my first participation, interacting with so many great scientists in the meeting remains a great personal experience. I highly recommend PhDs, postdocs and other scientists in the field to participate and actively engage in the discussions.  

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
The meeting taking place virtually in the middle of the current COVID pandemic makes for a memorable event. I would like to thank the organizers who thoughtfully managed the meeting. I especially appreciate the Discussion Zones and social events organizes as a way for us participants to connect.

Image provided by Esmaeil Amiri.

Thank you to Esmaeil for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Visitor of the Week: Binyam Belachew

Meet Binyam Belachew of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences! The 5th year graduate student is a member of Dr. Kevin D. Raney’s lab within the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department. He joined us this week for Nucleic Acid Therapies where Binyam presented a poster titled “Hepatitis C Virus Non-Structural protein 3 (HCVNS3) Binds and Unfolds Viral G4 RNA Structure.”

Tell us about your research.
My project focuses on understanding the mechanism by which HCV-NS3, the helicase protein encoded by HCV (Hepatitis C Virus) genome, interacts and regulates the unfolding of HCV-G4RNA, the conserved G-quadruplex secondary structures found within the HCV genome. By studying this protein-nucleic acid interaction, we might be able to find factors or processes that could be targeted to suppress the replication of various strains of HCV within a host cell.  

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
I have chosen this project because I was interested in learning more about viruses and how they replicate at a molecular level. In addition, our laboratory has tremendous experience in viral helicases, particularly HCV-NS3, and G-quadruplex structures, so I knew I would get the support I need from my colleagues in the laboratory to successfully complete my PhD.  

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
In my undergraduate Biology Senior Seminar class, the teacher, Professor Patricia Plant  suggested I read and present to the class a recently published paper, “Gene editing of CCR5 in autologous CD4 T cells of persons infected with HIV” (2014). I really enjoyed reading the paper. As I was preparing for my seminar, I read a number of scientific articles and books on viral replication and I started to develop an interest for the topic. The paper also gave me an idea of what project I would like to focus on in graduate school.                  

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
Through my work I hope to contribute to the effort being made by chemists and virologists in designing anti-viral agents that target G-quadruplex structure.

What do you love most about being a researcher?
The thing I like about being a researcher is that it allows me to participate in the advancements of science that improve or save the lives of others. On a personal level, research helps me refine my problem solving skills and gives me the mental exercise I need to keep my brain healthy.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
I wanted to attend to this meeting to learn more about RNA and their application in medicine. In addition, I chose to be part of this meeting to build my network and look for opportunities.   

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
From the meeting, I have learned the challenges and opportunities of using RNA as a therapeutic agent. Dr. Steven Dowdy explained it nicely: the major problem with RNA therapeutics is endosomal escape; only a fraction of the RNA given to the cell makes it to the cytosol. I am happy to have learned this because our laboratory has a growing interest in the field of oligonucleotide therapeutics.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
If the meeting stays virtual, I would advise future attendees to take advantage of the virtual PI Chats event where attendees sit with PI of their interest and learn from their experience and ask questions. If the future meetings are in-person, I hope similar events will be available for attendees.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
The Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer Vaccines Research and Development, Dr. Philip Dormitzer was the keynote speaker at this meeting. It was great to hear him speak of how Pfizer developed the COVID vaccine in a short period of time. I also enjoyed the Q&A session after his talk.

Thank you to Binyam for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

Image provided by Binyam Belachew.

Visitor of the Week: Fatemeh Sadat Fatemi Nasrollahi

Meet Fatemeh Sadat Fatemi Nasrollahi of the Pennsylvania State University! The PhD candidate is a member of Professor Réka Albert’s lab, who – this week – took part in her very first CSHL meeting: Network Biology. Fatemeh presented a poster titled “New attractor finding method based on generalized positive feedback loops and their functional relationships” and had this to say of her poster presentation experience:

This was my first time presenting a poster, and I had a wonderful experience. Several researchers were interested in my work, asked questions and we discussed the possible implications of my recent results. More importantly, these discussions helped me find new directions for further research in the future.

Tell us about your research.
As part of my research I study complex systems and their long-term behaviors using Boolean models. In particular, my research is focused on the development of a new method to identify stable communities to which large ecological systems such as plant-pollinator networks converge.

How did you decide to focus on this area/project?
Computational limitations restrict identifying all long-term behaviors in large networks. The concept of stable motif (a self-sustaining positive feedback loop) has been implemented to simplify this task in Boolean models in our group for a while. I was interested in adapting this concept in plant-pollinator networks (with network size of 10-100) and developing a fast method accordingly to identify the stable communities in plant-pollinator networks.

What and/or who is the inspiration behind your scientific journey?
I have been privileged to have had great instructors during my undergraduate and graduate studies. One of the most impactful courses I had was a course in biophysics, taught by Professor Seyed-reyhani from my undergraduate school, Sharif University of Technology (Iran). That course inspired me to learn more about biophysics, and find a research topic I was extremely enthusiastic about.

What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I think network science has so much potential to reveal the underlying cellular mechanisms leading to specific cell phenotypes and diseases. My plan is to work with other scientists in this field and use my network science knowledge to further understand the cellular dynamics. This knowledge may hopefully be utilized to solve important problems in biology and medicine.  

What do you love most about being a researcher?
Tackling new problems, and learning to ask myself the right questions when facing a new scientific challenge have been my favorite parts of doing research over the past several years.

What drew you to attend this meeting?
I remembered that other graduate students in my lab had great experiences with CSHL meetings, and they described the meeting as being relevant to our research. So, I decided to submit an abstract and participate in the Network Biology meeting.

What is your key takeaway from the Meeting; and how do you plan to apply it to your work?
The Network Biology meeting offers a great atmosphere for scientists in the field to learn about each other’s research, and hold productive discussions. I learned about computational methods in network biology that are being used to obtain better understanding of diseases and cell phenotypes. Some of these methods are relevant to my research and I am excited to learn more about them and possibly use them in my future projects. Also, scientific conversations with other researchers helped me see my work from their perspective. This meeting helped me realize that such meetings are an invaluable opportunity for graduate students like myself to present their research and interact with pioneering scientists in the field.

What feedback or advice would you share with someone considering to participate in this meeting?
The content of this meeting is especially relevant to scientists whose focus is the specific application of network science to cell biology. I believe it helps broaden their perspective and introduces them to new research problems in this area. I would also advise them to actively pursue scientific conversations to gain the unique experience of interacting with scientists who are eager to not only present their own work but to also learn more about your research and provide useful comments.

What’s the most memorable thing that happened during the Meeting?
I think the most memorable thing about this meeting was its virtual setting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While it seems the majority of the scientific community prefer in-person interactions during conferences, a significant takeaway from the meeting for me was that I was still able to present my results and get to know other people’s research through a virtual setting.

 Image provided by Fatemeh Sadat Fatemi Nasrollahi.

Thank you to Fatemeh for being this week's featured visitor. To meet other featured researchers - and discover the wide range of science that takes part in a CSHL meeting or course - go here.

CSHL's COVID/SARS CoV2 Rapid Research Meeting Reports III

Brianna Bibel, CSHL School of Biological Sciences

The COVID/SARS CoV2 Rapid Research Reports is a series of meetings organized by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) that brings together scientists from around the world to discuss the very latest research on the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. The series began in June 2020 and continues with the fifth installment this week.

Brianna “Bri” Bibel is a fifth-year graduate student in the CSHL School of Biological Sciences studying biochemistry and structural biology in Leemor Joshua-Tor’s lab. Bri is the scientist behind the popular blog, The Bumbling Biochemist and Instagram account @thebumblingbiochemist. Her style of explaining basic biochemical experiments is approachable, and appreciated by science teachers and young students alike. Here she guest writes for us, reflecting on the first three installments of the CSHL COVID meeting series.

---

The third COVID/SARS CoV2 Rapid Research Reports meeting was pretty doggone cool! And not just because we got to see videos of doggies being cute… Well, they weren’t only being cute – as University of Pennsylvania’s Cynthia Otto explained in one of the highlights of the August 25-26 meeting, they were being trained to sniff out the scent of COVID-19. As with the first two of this meeting series, the third meeting (virtually) brought together scientists from around the world to discuss the very latest findings about the novel coronavirus that’s captivated everyone from hard-core virologists to random grad students like me who, before this all struck, couldn’t recognize a coronavirus if it hit me in the face with its Spike protein!

What was especially great about this third meeting was that, unlike the first two meetings which featured only invited speakers (which, don’t get me wrong, was really awesome!), the third meeting featured speakers selected from submitted abstracts. Because of that, we got to learn more about viral proteins that haven’t gotten nearly as much attention as Spike, but which also offer tantalizing therapeutic targeting potential. Other exciting additions to this meeting were a virtual poster session and a roundtable discussion on convalescent plasma therapy. Here’s some of what I found the most fascinating.

Structural biology, molecular biology, and immunology

As with the previous two meetings, this one was broken up into sections by topic and first up was “Host-virus Interactions/Structure.” There were some great talks looking at which animals are likely susceptible to the virus based on the genetic similarity of their ACE2 receptors to our ACE2 receptor (which we know is the way this coronavirus is able to dock onto our cells). Minks definitely are susceptible to getting and spreading the disease, as we learned about from Wim van der Poel of Wageningen University, who told us about his work studying outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 amongst farmed minks in the Netherlands. In his studies, he was able to genetically trace outbreaks amongst people, minks, and even wandering cats!

Yogesh Gupta, UT Health San Antonio

Those “host-virus interactions” talks were really interesting but, as a student in a structural biology lab, I was particularly excited by the “structure” half of the session. At the second meeting we heard a lot about the Spike protein and RdRp, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase which the coronavirus uses to copy its genome. At this meeting, more of the coronavirus’ dozen or so Nsps (non-structural proteins) got their time in the spotlight. Yogesh Gupta of the University of Texas and Karla Satchell from Northwestern University each told us about their labs’ work studying the structure and function of the nsp16/nsp10 dimer. These two Nsps work together to help disguise the coronavirus’ RNAs from our immune system by adding a small chemical adornment called a methyl group to the viral RNAs’ cap, making the viral RNAs look more like host RNAs. Both labs had promising early findings on the potential to target these proteins for therapeutics, and Satchell explained how her work was open access so that other groups can use the crystal structures and biochemical data her lab has generated to come up with ideal drugs. You can learn more in their publications here and here.

The second session, “Coronavirus Biology,” continued the theme of “evading the immune system.” Nsp16/nsp10 helps the coronavirus evade innate viral RNA sensors, but our cells also have intricate signaling networks to pass along warnings from a number of other hints that something’s amiss. Often these pathways lead to the addition of sugar groups called ADP-ribose onto proteins. University of Kansas’ Yousef Alhammad told us about a specialized section of the coronavirus Nsp3 protein, called a macrodomain, which removes this distress-signal from proteins, effectively erasing the cell’s attempts to trigger protective pathways. 

Silvia Rouskin, Whitehead Institute

One of my favorite talks of the meeting was by the Whitehead Institute’s Silvia Rouskin. The coronavirus genome contains “recipes” for making different viral proteins, and the virus gets the cells’ protein-making complexes, ribosomes, to use these recipes to make their proteins. But instead of making each protein separately, the ribosomes make some of the viral proteins as continuous chains or “polyproteins” which the virus then cuts into individual proteins using its viral proteases. Rouskin told us about a way the virus can choose which proteins to make when by altering the shape of its RNA. A region of the coronavirus genome folds up into a knotty structure called a “frameshift element” that’s able to stall the ribosome long enough that it slips, causing it to backtrack a letter and add extra proteins onto the polypeptide chain its making. Rouskin used a technique she developed called DMS-MaPseq to figure out which RNA letters were bound to other letters inside of infected cells. This allowed her to find that the structure of a coronavirus’ frameshift element inside of cells is different from that predicted based on the structure of shorter, isolated RNA. And there isn’t just one structure - she showed that the RNA took on various different shapes (alternative conformations) with different propensities for inducing frameshifting. The ratios of the alternative conformations the RNA took depended on the cellular context, hinting that certain intracellular cues might help the virus regulate which proteins to make at which times.

“...even never-hospitalized people who have “fully recovered” from COVID-19 have some strange things going on with their immune system.”

In the third session, “Pathogenesis and the Immune Response” we got to hear from medical doctors, immunologists, and epidemiologists monitoring the generation and stability of immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infections. In a really fascinating talk by a medical student from the University of Alabama at Birmingham named Jacob Files, we learned how even never-hospitalized people who have “fully recovered” from COVID-19 have some strange things going on with their immune system. When he examined blood samples from patients over time, he found signs that immune cells called T cells were still working harder than would be expected since their virus was presumably cleared. At this point, they still aren’t sure what the significance is, but definitely something to keep an eye on. See more in this article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Roundtable discussion on convalescent plasma therapy 

Cynthia Otto’s coronavirus-sniffing dogs may have stolen the show the first day, but the highlight of Day 2 for me was the roundtable discussion on the use of convalescent plasma (CP) therapy for patients with COVID-19. The session came just days after the FDA issued a controversial Emergency Use Authorization for this treatment, in which the cell-free part of the blood (called the plasma) from recovered patients is infused into sick patients. The rationale behind this strategy is that, among other things, anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the recovered patients’ sera can help block the virus from infecting more cells and doing more damage in the sick patient’s body.

Arturo Casadevall, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

In the U.S., CP is a highly politicized issue but Arturo Casadevall from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine urged us to look past the hype and counter-hype to examine the data. And if there’s one person who knows that data well, it’s Casadevall. He led the early push for the testing of CP, which as he explained was no easy task. Nevertheless, he was able to put together a network of scientists and doctors who established an “expanded use” (EU) program through the Mayo Clinic. The EU program, though not set up as a controlled clinical trial, did allow doctors around the country to administer CP to severely ill patients – which they did in droves. In fact, the success of program had the downside of making it harder to enroll patients into controlled clinical trials, which made it harder to get the data needed to definitively say if CP is helpful. However, Casadevall showed us convincing signs based in part on analysis of data from the EU program that CP likely is helpful for some patients, especially if administered early and at “high doses” (sera containing high levels of protective antibodies). Read more about the analysis here.

“...one of the main reasons Casadevall is urging researching on CP [is because it] can be more easily deployed in developing countries.”

The other scientists on the panel, including Paul Bieniasz, Adrian Hayday, and Stanley Perlman, seemed optimistic about the potential of CP as well, but all stressed the need for more data – and from large randomized control trials so we can tell if effects are due to things like chance or the placebo effect. Since the treatment seems to help some people but not others, research is underway to try to figure out why this is and whether doctors can target the treatment to those most likely to benefit.

Speaking of benefitting, CP has the potential to potentially benefit large numbers of people who otherwise might go untreated. CP is often seen as a “stopgap measure” for addressing an emerging pandemic, before more targeted treatments are developed. But even once more targeted treatments (such as purified monocolonal antibodies) are available, they likely won’t be available to everyone; one of the main reasons Casadevall is urging research on CP is that, unlike extremely expensive and less stable monocolonal antibodies, CP can be more easily deployed in developing countries. The sincerity with which Casadevall spoke of his desire to help these underserved populations and the pain he felt over the polarization of the issue were palpable and stuck with me. I look forward to seeing the results of the controlled trials that are currently underway, and I hope that CP really is able to help patients around the world.

Although nothing can truly replace the experience of an in-person meeting, the third COVID/SARS CoV2 Rapid Research Reports meeting showed, once again, that virtual meetings can bring together scientists and allow them to disseminate their research to wide audiences as well as engage in fruitful discussions. It was an immense privilege to participate.

---

This post is part of a series. Go here for a summary of the first COVID meeting and here for the second meeting.

The next installment of the COVID/SARS CoV2 Rapid Research Reports series will take place on January 26-27, 2021.