When five researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, launched the new Center for an Informed Public back in December 2019, they had no idea what was coming. The center aims to study how misinformation propagates and use the findings to “promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.” Now, just a few months later, the coronavirus pandemic is generating a tidal…
Functional cellular proteomics platform developer IsoPlexis and the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) said today they will partner to study COVID-19 by mapping functional immune responses at the single cell level. The partners said they plan to carry out research on immune cells from people who have been diagnosed with, or recovered from, COVID-19. IsoPlexis’ single cell functional proteomics platform will…
The scientific sleuths who tracked down the origins of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak in the Seattle area have announced a new initiative to crack the case wide-open — and they’re signing up volunteers for self-testing at home. So many volunteers responded in the first few hours that the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN, reached its capacity for today and told…
A woman with the right attitude, patience, and perseverance can do it all. The story of K. Ingrid Durenberger’s success is an example of how to move forward in spite of hardships, unknowns, and adverse conditions. She has done it all – made hard decisions about changing career paths, choosing to raise a family over working outside the home and…
Microsoft and Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies announced Friday they will work together to map the immune response to COVID-19. The goal of the partnership is to study population-wide immune responses to the disease. Their findings will be publicly available via an open data portal. By studying broad immune responses to the virus, the companies hope they can provide unique insights as researchers search…
A team of computational neuroscientists at the Allen Institute have unveiled their largest virtual brain recreation to date: A computer-based simulation of the part of the mouse brain that processes what the animal sees, containing 230,000 lifelike digital neurons. The team published an article describing the new model, which is openly available for others in the community to use, in the journal Neuron earlier…
The basic science laboratories at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle are under the same roof as the clinical care facilities but separated by long hallways. Right now, those halls are very quiet, as faculty members with children and those at high risk of contracting COVID-19 have shifted to remote work, and the remaining scientists are avoiding…
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists are taking a new look at a vaccine meant to stop the deadliest infectious disease on earth. It is not coronavirus, nor bird flu nor HIV. It is tuberculosis. Every year, tuberculosis takes about 1.5 million lives, most of them in the developing world, and while there is no truly effective vaccine against the hardy…
As coronavirus drives most of us into our homes to stem the rate of infection, a select group of scientists is working on ways to keep this from happening again. Some of the scientists are in our backyard, the epicenter of the U.S. crisis, including Dr. Deborah Fuller, a vaccinologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Washington. She leads one of…
The first shots in the first vaccine trial for the new coronavirus were administered Monday as a small group of volunteers in Seattle will receive varying doses over the next several weeks to test the safety of the experimental vaccine. Doctors at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle gave the first shots in the trial aimed at combating the spread of COVID-19. “Finding a safe and…