DISCOVER
U N D S MH S V S .
COVID 19
GE T T ING A HE A D OF T HE
NEXT PANDEMIC UND researchers direct their focus to COVID-19 research, and make the case for expanded infectious disease research space at UND.
C O MB AT T ING COVID Dr. Nadeem Khan at his office in the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. (photo courtesy UND Today)
Anxious, but not surprised. That’s how infectious disease researchers
novel vaccine against COVID-19. We will
prevention, preparedness, and treatment.
attempt to understand how COVID-19 is initiating the disease process in the lungs
at the UND School of Medicine & Health
Figuring it out
Sciences (SMHS) tend to characterize their
Each of these researchers are diving head-
response to the emergence of SARS-
first into a pandemic that, at the time of
CoV-2, the source of COVID-19.
this writing, was only about a month old in
As Khan put it, although COVID-19 is a
the U.S.
novel virus, which emerged just last year, it
“[The influenza outbreak of 1918] infected one-third of the world, and killed around
A National Institutes of Health-funded
50 million people, including 1 million in the
influenza researcher, Khan shifted his
U.S.” said Nadeem Khan, Ph.D., assistant
attention quickly to COVID-19 in March.
professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the SMHS. “After that, every decade or two, you see the emergence of some pandemic flu or SARS or Ebola. These viruses emerge, they become lethal, they disseminate, they transmit. It doesn’t happen every year, but it is likely every decade or two.”
10
only coronavirus vaccines, but pandemic
“There are two lines of investigation going on now with coronavirus,” Khan told North Dakota Medicine via video conference. “The first is developing an effective vaccine, which is able to control infection. The other is understanding how COVID-19 causes disease. Once you understand how
and how this is leading to developing a fatal pneumonia.”
is related not only to influenza but another coronavirus—SARS—that hit the world hard in 2003. Therefore, coronavirus, whose genome was sequenced in China months ago, is less mysterious than it might seem to non-scientists. COVID-19 seems to be structured like the flu, for example. It is also transmitted and acquired in a similar way and produces similar symptoms.
the virus causes disease in the respiratory
This is all good news, said Khan, who sees
And because such pandemics seem to be
tract, then you’re able to selectively
similar proteins in each of the viruses in
getting more regular, said Khan, he and
intervene in the disease process and
question.
his Department of Biomedical Sciences
stop the disease. We are interested in
colleagues Min Wu and Masfique Mehedi
both aspects: understanding the disease
are moving as fast as they can to study not
pathogenesis as well as developing a
North Dakota Medicine Summer 2020
“To develop an efficacious vaccine against COVID could take up to a year and a half,” Khan shrugged. “By that time, you
