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Tracking COVID-19 Variants University team’s research will help determine vaccines’ efficacy
Dr. David Andrews, associate professor at the Miller School of Medicine, reviews data with senior medical technologist Ranjini Valiathan, center, and Paola Pagan, executive director of laboratory operations for UHealth.
With new mutations of COVID-19 continuing to emerge, raising concerns about the ability of vaccines to manage them, the University is one of a handful of academic medical centers across the country testing COVID-19 samples for the variants and sequencing them. “Because of our geographic location, it’s very important for us to develop these capabilities,” says Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Health System and Miller School of Medicine, who developed the University’s COVID-19 testing program for patients and employees. “If we are able to find other variants, we can then determine whether they are covered by our vaccines and whether they actually cause more severe disease—all of this information is helpful for the world to know.” 2 MIAMI Spring 2021 miami.edu/magazine
Dr. David Andrews, an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Miller School, is leading a collaborative initiative to track and sequence the emerging variants. Early this year, his team began collecting and testing positive COVID-19 samples for the variants from patients at UHealth Tower and Jackson Health System’s three hospitals, along with University faculty and staff members. By mid-March, the team had ramped up its sampling capacity to 200 samples per week. Simultaneously, a fraction of the samples is chosen for genetic sequencing, which takes five days to complete. Miller School faculty members assisted with this effort by the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics (HIHG), a UHealth facility. “The striking thing is the geographic diversity of the variants—Brazil, California, New York, Saudi Arabia, even one
