Radm. Richard Childs, assistant U.S. surgeon general and clinical director of NHLBI's Division of Intramural Research, is back on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, and a chance encounter with a former colleague led to testing a therapeutic for COVID-19 that continues to show promise.
If the global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how to adjust to the unexpected. That’s what three NIH Medical Research Scholars have been learning since NIH shifted into extreme telework mode to prevent spread of Covid-19.
They were already big-wave surfers over at the Office of Extramural Research, that group responsible for the orderly, shrewd, fair—and seemingly invisible—distribution of about 80 percent of NIH’s annual budget. So it takes more than a pandemic to knock them off their surfboards.
NIAID researchers are using new technologies to develop a vaccine against Covid-19 as fast as possible, said Dr. Barney Graham, Vaccine Research Center deputy director. “Since 2009, a number of key technologies have emerged. They have increased our capacity for making new vaccines,” he said during an NIH Covid-19 scientific interest group lecture on Apr. 22.
On the Cover
At the largest zebrafish facility in the country, Kevin Bishop, NHGRI Zebrafish Core staff member, holds up a tank of zebrafish to observe their behavior and physiology. Using molecular techniques, researchers alter the zebrafish’s genome to mimic what is seen in human patients in the clinic.