A team including scientists from Yale School of Medicine and Scott Handley, PhD, Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine, have received $575,000 from PolyBio Research Foundation to fund long COVID research. The grant will support the team’s efforts to define mechanisms by which the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist for long periods of time in tissue and blood.
Dr. Handley’s role in the project will be to use targeted long-read sequencing technology to define full length SARS CoV2 genomes from tissues. “The goal is to identify specific mutations, or predict secondary RNA structures that may be associated with or involved with the immune response driving long COVID,” Dr. Handley said.
The rest of the research team includes:
- Akiko Iwasaki, PhD: Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Dermatology; of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology; and of Epidemiology (microbial diseases) at Yale School of Medicine; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
- Richard A. Flavell, PhD, FRS: Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
- Anna Pyle, PhD: Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and Professor of Chemistry at Yale School of Medicine
- Craig Wilen, MD, PhD: Associate Professor of Laboratory Medicine and of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, and Medical Director of Yale School of Medicine’s Immune Monitoring Core Facility.
Read more about the collaboration in this press release from Yale School of Medicine.