Running Forward: Our Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

At the start of the spring 2020 semester, students congregated in large lecture halls, researchers huddled together in narrow labs, and staff members collaborated in shared workspaces. However, the rapidly evolving nature of the coronavirus pandemic quickly created a new normal for the College of Sciences. Across UTSA, 4,600 courses pivoted online and 6,500 faculty, staff and student employees worked from home.

Campus laboratories downsized to essential personnel only, but researchers still found ways to benefit the local community. Dr. Juan Gutierrez, chair of the Department of Mathematics, constructed a COVID-19 epidemiological model San Antonio health officials used to plan their official response. In collaboration with UT Health San Antonio, chemistry professors Dr. Stanton McHardy and Dr. Doug Frantz made large batches of hand sanitizer for providers and staff at UT Health’s Physicians locations. Labs across UTSA donated their personal protection equipment (PPE) to UT Health San Antonio, including 363 safety glasses, 1,850 surgical masks, and 14,176 gloves.

Researchers with UTSA’s MATRIX AI Consortium for Human Well-Being created a website to help Texans share the location of hard-tofind consumer goods in real time. The website harnessed the power of crowd-sourcing to populate the recovery map with real time data. The site also provided information such as the location of testing sites, mandatory business closures, travel advisories and a map that tracked the spread of the virus in Texas. Dr. Amina Qutub, a biomedical engineering professor; Dr. Hongjie Xie, chair of the Department of Geological Sciences; and graduate students Younghyun Koo and Teg Pandit contributed to the project.

Dr. Doug Frantz, the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and co-founder of UTSA’s Center for Innovative Drug Discovery, screened small molecule libraries to identify compounds that could potentially be developed into a coronavirus treatment. The compounds have chemical properties similar to hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two immunosuppressive drugs previously used to treat and prevent malaria, and are part of a class of compounds known as quinolines. Frantz’s compounds are also quinolines, but they are composed of different atoms and bonds that could provide additional benefits for those infected with the novel coronavirus.

Frantz then shipped samples of about 250 of those compounds to collaborators at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Researchers at UTMB Galveston pretreated cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, with the compounds designed at UTSA. Once the results are in, Frantz and three UTSA graduate students as well as scientists of the San Antonio Partnership for Precision Theraputics will work on refining a treatment based on any compounds that show promise. Frantz hopes to develop a treatment to reduce the severity of sickness for those infected when the next strain of SARS-CoV-2 emerges. The typical process of drug development, from initial research to animal testing to clinical trials to FDA approval, has a timeline of five to eight years. In the meantime, the compounds will help the scientific community understand how the coronavirus attacks cells and reacts to molecules.

Dr. Karl Klose, recipient of the Robert J. Kleberg Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg College of Sciences Professorship and the director of the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, is leading a collaborative study to work on a potential COVID-19 vaccine. The San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics awarded the team $200,000 to conduct their research. Team members include scientists from all four institutions in the partnership—UTSA, UT Health San Antonio, Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Southwest Research Institute. The team’s goal is to develop a novel vaccine to combat COVID-19 based on decades of work on tularemia, a bio-threat also known as rabbit fever caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis.

Klose has been studying the bacterium F. tularensis since 2001. After his lab discovered how to inactivate the organism’s ability to cause disease, a live vaccine candidate was identified that can induce protection against F. tularensis in the lungs. Klose’s team aims to adapt the vaccine to induce protection against SARS CoV-2.