How researchers are doing in the Covid era

One of the amazing aspects of the human response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been how quickly scientists have turned to studying all facets of the virus in order to mitigate loss of life and plan a return to normal. At the same time, much research on non-coronaviruses has all but come to a halt.

With research labs and offices closed for everyone except essential workers, many scientists were stuck at home, their fieldwork and meetings canceled, and planned experiments scrapped as they struggled to figure out how. continue their research programs. Many took the opportunity to catch up on writing grants and articles; some – between childcare – have come up with strategic workarounds to keep the scientific juice flowing.

To assess how researchers from different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke to a range of scientists and technical staff – among them a specialist in the preservation of genetically important strains of fruit flies, the head of maintenance of an astronomical observatory working on telescope safety and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease. Here are some slices of scientific life during the pandemic.

Agnieszka Czechowicz, Stanford University School of Medicine

Pediatrician Agnieszka Czechowicz, Stanford University[/ars_img]Czechowicz is a pediatrician in Stanford’s Stem Cell Transplantation and Regenerative Medicine Division, where she heads a research group that develops new therapies and conducts clinical trials in rare genetic diseases.

Agnieszka Czechowicz’s father suffers from severe Parkinson’s disease. The coronavirus pandemic has forced him to stay indoors and away from people, depriving him of the physical conditioning and social interactions he needs to cope with his illness. A recent fall has left him in hospital, bringing further concern that he could contract Covid-19 there and isolate him further. >> For Czechowicz, her situation has highlighted the challenges the coronavirus has placed on those who conduct clinical trials, including those she heads, which involve patients going to hospitals across the country. “Would I ask him to go to any clinical site right now for a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease?” she says. “Absolutely not.”

The pandemic has forced Czechowicz to halt clinical trials it oversees for a rare genetic disease in children called Fanconi anemia, a condition that impairs the body’s ability to repair damaged DNA and often leads to bone marrow failure. and cancer. The treatment Czechowicz and his colleagues are testing involves extracting hematopoietic stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, inserting a healthy copy of a missing or defective gene, and then infusing those cells back into the patient.

“Every aspect of what I do is massively affected by the pandemic,” says Czechowicz. One of his first clinical trials is testing the safety of therapy. But during the initial shutdown – which began in mid-March and lasted for two months – his patients could not easily get to Stanford for necessary follow-up visits, and remote monitoring was difficult.

“We need to do special blood and bone marrow tests. In particular, getting samples is essential to ensure that patients, for example, do not develop leukemia, ”she says. “There’s no way to know that without actually checking the bone marrow.” She had to overcome great obstacles to have her patients assessed.

Another early-stage trial, designed to determine the effectiveness of therapy, also had to stop the recruitment of new patients. Because speed is important when it comes to treating Fanconi anemia – children probably lose stem cells all the time – any delay in treatment can be a source of great anxiety for their parents. Czechowicz had to explain to them why the trials were temporarily suspended. “It was really difficult to have these discussions with the families,” she says.

With the easing of travel and workplace restrictions, families began traveling to Stanford in June – but with infections on the rise, many families are reluctant again, Czechowicz says. Fortunately, her trials are small, so she can guide each family through the process of safely resuming trials and continuing follow-up. Its own team must also follow strict security protocols. For example, even though his lab has 10 members, only two can be in the lab at a time, and only one parent is allowed to enter the clinic with the child.

Not all clinical trials can pay such attention to individual patients. Large trials with hundreds of patients can involve multiple sites and require much more monitoring, so resuming them remains difficult. In addition, restrictions on full-bore work slow down the process of new therapies. “We won’t see the impact of this for many years,” Czechowicz says.

Abolhassan Jawahery, University of Maryland, College Park

Jawahery is a particle physicist and member of LHCb, one of the main experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

In December 2018, long before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the LHC was closed for upgrades. Installed in a 27 kilometer-long tunnel about 100 meters underground, the LHC accelerates two proton beams, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, and sends them into head-on collision at four locations. There, four gigantic underground detectors – ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE – sift through particle debris created by collisions, looking for evidence of new physics. (For example, ATLAS and CMS found the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle of the Higgs field, which gives all elementary particles their mass.) >> For his next series of experiments, which aim to probe the properties of subatomic particles with greater precision, the LHC needed to increase the intensity of its proton beams. Therefore, all four detectors also had to be upgraded, to handle the resulting higher temperatures and increased radiation at the particle collision sites. Work was on track for a restart around May 2021 until the pandemic swept away all cautious plans from scientists.

The LHC and its four detectors are each managed by a separate collaboration. CERN, which manages the LHC, hopes to be able to restart the collider by February 2022. “They think they can start the accelerator if there are no more major catastrophic events,” said physicist Abolhassan Jawahery. But the impact on the four detectors is less clear.

For the LHCb upgrade, Jawahery’s team at the University of Maryland had worked on building around 4,000 highly sensitive electronic circuits. These cards must be “burned” before they can be sent to CERN. “We put them in an oven, literally baking the boards, then do extensive testing to prepare them so that we can put them in the accelerator and run them for 10 to 20 years,” Jawahery explains. “And none of this could have been done while the pandemic was stopped.”

The team resumed work in June, but with restrictions put in place by the state of Maryland. Jawahery runs two labs and has only been cleared for months for two people at a time in one lab and three in the other, making progress extremely slow. However, his team is fortunate not to depend on supplies from countries hard hit by the coronavirus. The other laboratories were not so lucky. Scientists in Milan, for example, built electronic components and detectors for the LHCb, and a laboratory at Syracuse University in New York City built sensors that were based on expeditions from Milan. When Milan was shut down completely at the height of the pandemic, Syracuse also stopped working on components dependent on Milan.

For Jawahery, the lockdown had a silver lining. The last LHC run produced around 25 gigabytes of data per second, but his team found little time to analyze any before the pandemic. “We were complaining that we were spending all of our time building the new instrument and the data kept coming in,” he says. When he and his team were kicked out of their labs, they turned to their backlog of data. “We could do real physics,” he says. “We are already preparing to publish articles.”