How a ‘rag tag team’ of scientists joined forces to fight COVID-19 on campus
From left:"COVIDWarriors" Cole Hager, Lina Tat, Biofrontiers Institute Director Roy Parker, Morgan Fink, lab director Tassa Saldiand Megan Winter in the saliva testing lab. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/91Թ)
In January 2020, 91Թ researchers were already facing a busy year.
Leslie Leinwand, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, was developing new treatments for inherited heart diseases. Integrative Physiology Professor Matt McQueen had just kicked off a nationwide concussion study. Shelly Miller, a professor of environmental engineering, was studying harmful airborne emissions produced during cooking. Biochemist Roy Parker was investigating the role messenger RNA plays in disease.
They worked at opposite ends of campus, in disparate fields toward distant goals. Some had never met. Some probably never would have.
Then, a mysterious virus started making headlines, and after its first confirmed case on campus, 91Թ, unfathomably, ceased in-person operations March 16.
One by one, a team of often-siloed scientists began to pivot, back-burnering their own research and personal lives to face a daunting challenge: to bring 31,000 students back to campus safely in the midst of a deadly virus easily spread by young people who don’t know they have it.
“We were just this rag tag team that started meeting over Zoom,” said Leinwand, who in early spring convened a dozen volunteers for 90 minutes after work to begin hashing out a plan.
They’d meet for nearly a year, seven days a week, sometimes multiple times a day, with pets and kids wandering into their frames as their meals got cold.
“There was no primer and no precedent. We were just learning as we went,” recalled Leinwand, who pulled in volunteers from Student Affairs, Medical Services and Facilities Management to help deploy the science-based solutions taking root. “It was intense.”
Today, the machine they quietly built together is humming along smoothly. On the second floor of the BioFrontiers Institute, a young team of “COVID Warriors,” as they call themselves, processes up to 2,500 saliva samples daily, from free campus screening sites using a new test invented in Parker’s lab.
Results are recorded one-by-one, late at night, by a sometimes bleary-eyed post-doctoral researcher, Kristen Bjorkman, who volunteered to help last spring and never stopped. Then, they’re delivered via a smartphone app developed by campus computer scientists. When a student tests positive, via a follow-up diagnostic test at Wardenburg, one of 80 student contact tracers convened by McQueen last spring, kicks into action.
Leslie Leinwand, Scientific Director of the BioFrontiers Institute, helped lead the campus COVID response.
Meanwhile, an expansive monitoring system, conceived by an environmental engineer named Cresten Mansfeldt—who’d arrived on campus just four months before COVID hit—tracks wastewater from residence halls for early signs of the virus.
Students are again attending classes and playing music, with masks, instrument covers and improved ventilation informed by Miller’s research on airborne transmission.
While many universities continue to operate primarily online, 91Թ is inching its way back to something resembling a normal campus.
Provost Russ Moore credits science.
“No one ever dreamed that the impact of this pandemic would be as large and lasting as it is, and we and other universities were knocked on our heels trying to respond to the unknown,” Moore said. “Without anyone asking them, this small group of people dropped their lives and said, ‘Let’s do what we can to keep this campus going.’ They didn’t ask for credit or care who knew about it. They just dove in and got it done.”
Sleepless nights and lasting legacies
Even before the pandemic, Leinwand, chief scientific officer of the BioFrontiers Institute, didn’t sleep much.
“Honestly, I think it’s a waste of time,” she said of the five hours she gets nightly. “If I could do away with it entirely I would.”
She keeps a small notepad on her bedside, waking often to scribble ideas or work through problems. In spring of 2020, after Chancellor Phil DeStefano suggested she spearhead development of a COVID-response plan, she churned through those notebooks.
At the time, existing nasopharyngeal tests—not-so-fondly referred to as “brain probes”—were in short supply and taking as long as nine days to return results.
Leinwand and Parker began developing a plan for monitoring on campus.
“We looked at what was happening around the country and realized we needed to develop the capacity to do some things on our own,” said Parker, who has spent his career studying RNA (ribonucleic acid), the molecular messenger that carries genetic information for many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.
Two research associates who had worked in Parker’s lab for decades, Carolyn Decker and Denise Muhlrad, put their heads together to help develop a fast, sensitive test more amenable to college students—based on saliva instead of nasal samples.
“I felt like most things were out of control in the world around me, but this was some small way that I could have control and be helpful,” said Decker.
As she refined the test, Muhlrad designed novel primers and scoured the internet for reagents and precious PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machines, which can detect the genetic material of SARS-CoV2 in less than a thimble full of spit.
