Health

12 HE ALTH • Summer 2020 • By Devina Bhalla A trio of researchers at UMass Medical School in Worcester are attacking the coronavirus pandemic from three different angles, as part of a $17-million Massachusetts effort to help the world combat the disease which has killed more than 400,000 people globally. The researchers – Dr. Robert Finberg, Dr. Ann Moormann, and Dr. Jeffrey Luban – are studying ways to treat COVID-19, understand how it spreads, how people can be immune from its effects, and how herd immunity can be achieved. "We would like to know a little bit more about exactly how the virus causes the damage that it does," Finberg said. The three UMass Medical School researchers are part of the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, known as Stopping coronavirus MassCPR, which is a statewide initiative including scientists and clinicians from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts, and local biomedical research institutes. MassCPR is working to develop the infrastructure to address the COVID-19 pandemic. It was created through a research agreement between Harvard and the Evergrande Group in China, which is sharing financial support equally between Massachusetts research and researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health in China. The funding is for five years. MassCPR has obtained roughly $16.5 million to support and fund this first round of initiatives and projects. After receiving more than 400 applications for funding in March, MassCPR chose more than 60 applicants to receive funding, including the three at UMass. "This was obviously a very stiff competition, so anyone who actually received funding had an amazing application," said Professor David Golan from Harvard Medical School, one of the faculty co-leads of MassCPR. According to UMass Medical School, projects selected were for their potential to inf luence clinical outcomes within the next 12 months. Luban, for example, a professor of molecular medicine at UMass Medical School, is researching the virologic mechanisms of COVID-19, attempting to discover what makes it unique. He aims to precisely understand infectiousness of coronavirus with his research. Host cells and antiviral possibilities Finberg, chair of the UMass Department of Medicine, is researching how to identify and target host cells and genes crucial in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. His background in studying respiratory viruses makes researching COVID-19 a natural shift. "The questions I was interested in are one, whether we can find a drug to treat the virus … and the other was to find out exactly what cells the virus infects and what kind of cells respond to the virus," Finberg said in a phone interview. His project funded by MassCPR focuses on specifically these two parts, how disease is caused and if there could be a viral treatment. Finberg does this through studying human samples. Dr. Jeffrey Luban, professor of molecular medi- cine at UMass Medical School Dr. Robert Finberg, chair of the UMass Department of Medicine ree UMass Medical School researchers are studying ways to stop, treat and protect against COVID-19, as the disease continues to kill worldwide

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