publication date: Sep. 18, 2020

Alan Blum, MD

Professor and Endowed Chair in Family Medicine,

Director, The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society,

University of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa

Eric Solberg, MS

Vice president, academic & research affairs,

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston;

Faculty associate, McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics,

McGovern School of Medicine, Houston

This story is part of The Cancer Letters ongoing coverage of COVID-19s impact on oncology. A full list of our coverage is availablehere.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic makes it possible to compare and contrast the public health and political responses to previous health crises.

The most obvious comparison is to the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which took the lives of 675,000 Americans in less than two years.

Yet a comparison with cigarette smoking, which has killed untold millions of Americans in the 20th century and continues to take the lives of 500,000 a year, is arguably more illuminating. At first glance, comparing COVID-19 to cigarettes seems illogical. Yes, people who take up smoking do so willingly, although most do so before they reach adulthood. And yes, those who contract COVID-19 do not willingly seek out the virus.

Disease and death from smoking take years, even decades to occur. Deaths from COVID-19 can occur within days or weeks, albeit in less than 2.9% of victims, most of whom have comorbid conditions such as hypertension, obesity, and emphysema.

As we assess the 50-year War on Cancer that was declared when President Richard M. Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, some parallels and lessons from the past that can be gleaned from anti-smoking campaigns and applied to the efforts against COVID-19.

As defiant and skeptical as President Trump may be of the preventive behavioral measures that all health agencies agree are the first step to contain the spread of the virus, his magical-thinking approach mirrors the playbook of previous presidents to ending the cigarette pandemic, even decades after it was recognized as the nations leading avoidable cause of death and disease.

Should anyone really be surprised that when it comes to public health and health care, money and politics take precedence over science?

In early April, no sooner had Anthony Fauci, of the White House COVID-19 Task Force, come to the conclusion that all Americans, not just front-line health workers and patients, needed to wear face masks, practice social distancing, and wash their hands to prevent the spread of COVID-19, President Trump began subverting this message by retweeting Faucis original assertion in March that mask-wearing by the general public was not yet necessary.

By mid-summer, Trump had rejected the recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on protecting meat processing plant workers, teachers, other school personnel, and children from COVID-19. Trump not only muted, muzzled, and marginalized the CDC, he had also become its de facto spokesperson.

Even as he has publicly played down the ease of spread and the adverse health consequences of COVID-19, last week we listened to the recording of his February interview by reporter Bob Woodward, in which Trump acknowledged the ferocity of the new virus.

This called to mind the response by another president to the efforts by the top health official in his administration to launch the federal governments first anti-smoking campaign. In January 1978, U.S. Secretary of Health Education and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr., announced that HEW would place the weight of its scientific authority behind programs to inform the publicespecially the youngabout why they should not smoke and how they can quit if they wish. As the chief health officer of government, I have the duty to see that we do just that.

Within weeks, Califanos efforts were being undermined by President Jimmy Carter, who traveled to North Carolina to assure tobacco famers that the government would make cigarette smoking even safer than it is today. As Califanos campaign continued to gain momentum, and after HEW published the most comprehensive indictment yet of cigarette smoking in its 1979 Surgeon Generals Report, Carter fired Califano. There was little doubt that the main reason was his fervent anti-smoking stance.

The present-day Republican-led opposition to state and local ordinances mandating the wearing of face masks in public places is akin to the vocal opposition in 1964 to federal legislation to require an understated warning on the side of cigarette packs (Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health).

The staunchest opponents of the warning were not just the cigarette manufacturers and tobacco state congressmen, but also the American Medical Association, which claimed that the public was already well informed about the dangers of smoking.

In those days, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms were beating back anti-smoking bills introduced by Democratic Sens. Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin and Reps. Henry Waxman and Ron Wyden. Today, we can take in the spectacle of Republican Sen. Rand Paul (a physician) and Republican House Members Matt Goetz, Luis Gohmert, and Mark Meadows deriding the recommendation to wear face masks.

All four contracted COVID-19, with Gohmert blaming his infection on having to wear a mask.

At his nationally televised town meeting on Sept. 15, in which he claimed that herd mentality could make the virus disappear, Trump also claimed that the repeated putting on and taking off a mask could increase the chances of becoming infected with COVID-19.

The other two physicians in the Senate, Republicans John Barrasso and Bill Cassidy, have stood behind Trump every step of the pandemic. In May, Barrasso, an orthopedic surgeon until he was appointed to the Senate in 2007, cited his medical background to support Trumps call to end COVID-19 containment shutdowns and echoed Trumps comment that we cannot allow the cure to be worse than the disease.

Granted, oversimplifying the comparison between the response to COVID-19 and the fight against smoking risks reducing it to a body count competition. Yet, that is just what Stanford historian Robert Proctor did in a book review in the July 7 issue of JAMA:

It all seems so February. Cigarettes remain the leading preventable cause of death, but that morbid fact is easily lost in more pressing pandemics. It is worth keeping in mind that even if the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) ends up killing 200,000 people in the U.S., that number will not be even half the annual toll from cigarettes, which still kill half a million Americans every year.

Such a comment is as simplistic and cold-hearted as any of Trumps unempathetic pronouncements downplaying the catastrophic impact of COVID-19. One hears echoes of the claim that the virus will just disappear, but smoking will remain.

Sadly, this is the same narrative that all too many individuals who work in the field of tobacco control have used for other emerging health crises such as the rapid rise in obesity, namely that smoking is always the bigger killer.

They seem to see other health issues as a threat to their turf. Proctor calls the assertion that his smoking dog is bigger than your COVID dog an enduring constancy and insists that scholars need to pay more attention to cigarettes, even in these distressing days of plague.

Any focus on disease that ignores the cigarette or the cigarette industry is like pretending to have an interest in malaria while paying no attention to mosquitoes or swamps. Nicotine addiction is likely to outlive coronavirus, shackling millions in chains that lead to suffering and death. The havoc wreaked on human health is worse than any virus.

Nathan Schachtman, an attorney and lecturer at Columbia Law School who has written on tobacco litigation, is appalled by Proctors claim. This type of comparison between COVID-19 and smoking is inapposite, he says. COVID puts me at risk from even a brief encounter with an infected person. I have no control as an individual over the risk of this infectious disease; it absolutely requires coordinated action by government. We can all agree that both smoking and COVID are public health problems, while refraining from making inane comparisons. The thing about COVID-19 is that a pandemic ensures that there will be innocent victimspeople who did not assume the risk, but had the risk of death and disability foisted upon them by fellow citizens.

Two hundred thousand deathsin addition to hundreds of thousands of potential long-haulers suffering from crushing fatigue, lung and heart damage, and other problemscaused by a single pathogen in just six months extrapolates to 300,000 deaths this year, plus a lingering morbidity comparable to that caused by cigarette smoking. And there is no cure in sight, but rather false promises by the president of a breakthrough vaccine just around the corner before Election Day.

Instead of trying to make the case that smoking is worse than COVID-19, we should instead be applying the lessons weve learned from anti-smoking efforts to reduce the toll of COVID-19, argues Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health. Most obviously, the chronic conditions of emphysema and cardiovascular disease that help COVID take hold are frequently due to smoking. The successes and failures of the past five decades of anti-smoking actions are playing out now in the daily COVID-19 death tallies.

Writing in Financial Times on Aug. 4, Sir Richard Feachem, who served as under-secretary-general of the United Nations and founding executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, warns that counting on a COVID-19 vaccine to come to our rescue soon is not only unlikely but is a dangerous assumption on which to plan the overall response to the pandemic.

Politicians and vaccine developers have incentives to reinforce this assumption, he notes, in spite of the long odds against a vaccine with high efficacy, a protracted duration of protection, a convenient dosing schedule, and the ability to administer billions of doses.

Is this not reminiscent of the never-ending quest for the Holy Grail of the safe cigarette? Can anyone doubt that the biggest failure in the history of the National Cancer Institute is not to have dispelled the myth that filtered cigarettes can prevent lung cancer?

The tobacco industrys view, as reflected in the Tobacco Observer, a publication of the Tobacco Institute, April 1982.

Following the release of the 1964 Surgeon Generals Report, there was a dramatic increase in advertising claims by the tobacco companies implying that filtered cigarettes were safer than non-filtered ones.

This campaign extended to Hollywood, where TV and movie heroes and heroines smoked filtered brands while the crooks and tramps smoked non-filters. Alas, the history of the filter is at the heart of why the reduction in smoking has been so slow.

Beginning in the early-1950s, when the devastating reports of the impact of smoking on health were making front-page news and beginning to drive down cigarette sales, the tobacco industry took the upper hand by proclaiming in full-page newspaper advertisements across the U.S. that it would fund research to identify and remove any harmful ingredients from cigarette smoke.

By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the National Cancer Institutes research efforts on smoking were almost entirely directed toward finding a safer cigarette. This dead-end research didnt get the ax until 1980, when Vincent DeVita became director of NCI and began shifting the focus of smoking research to getting heavy smokers to quit.

Even then, a far more heavily funded NCI research project in the 1980s was chemoprevention, which aimed to reduce lung cancer in smokers with large doses of vitamin A. The highly promoted study was halted when it was found that this caused an increase in lung cancer.

The unequivocal conclusion of the landmark 1964 U.S. Surgeon Generals report on smoking and health that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases was to have ended a debate that had raged for decades.

Instead, the tobacco industry made a preemptive strike by funneling a total of $18 million over 14 years to the American Medical Associationthe only major health organization to withhold its endorsement of the reportin a research program to identify and remove any possible harmful components of cigarette smoke.

Why did the AMA choose not to campaign against smoking, but rather to conduct the same kind of research that the report had already found sufficient for its indictment of smoking?

It did so in order to remain in the good graces of tobacco state senators, whom it counted on to help prevent the creation of Medicare by Congress. This, in turn, leads to another villain that has gone unnoticed: the insurance industry, which never lifted a finger to fight smoking, even long after a small Massachusetts insurer, State Mutual Life Assurance Company, offered the first non-smoker discount after the SG report came out in 1964.

Because the anti-smoking narrative has been revised as a great victory instead of an abject failure, the rogues gallery is endless. One of the genuine leaders was the fearless Sen. Maureen Neuberger, who castigated not just the tobacco companies but also the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil AMA in her 1964 book Smoke Screen: Tobacco and the Public Welfare.

The AMA/tobacco industry collaboration distributed research funds to dozens of universities to keep scientists in their laboratories and not out testifying to the need to end smoking now. Columbia University, although not a participant as an institution with the AMA program, went so far as to market a patented super-filter that it claimed would remove the cancer-causing tar and prevent lung cancer. It didnt.

The filter con endures to the present day. Ninety-nine percent of cigarettes sold are filtered brands, in spite of the fact that filters likely increase the risk of death and disease from smoking by virtue of the smoker needing to inhale more deeplyand by fostering complacency about the dangers of smoking.

Essentially the same kind of players that fought efforts to pass clean indoor air legislation or bills to ban or restrict cigarette advertising and promotion are at it again with COVID-19. The cigarette companies filter and low-tar hucksterism is not unlike the touting by Trump of oleander, hydroxychloroquine, zinc, bleach, Lysol, and UV light for the prevention of COVID infections.

Meanwhile, Trumps COVID-19 advisers include individuals untrained in infectious disease, notably retired Stanford radiologist Scott Atlas. In a scathing op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 10 by Stanford epidemiologists Steven Goodman and Melissa Bondy, co-signed by all of their epidemiology colleagues at the university, the authors castigate Atlas for recommending less COVID-19 testing and less mask-wearing in indoor public spaces, as well as for downplaying the nonfatal health risks of the virus and its transmissibility by children.

The Washington Post and The New York Times were criticized by an editorialist at The Wall Street Journal for questioning Atlas fitness and credentials, even though Atlas got the job after espousing his unconventional views on Fox News. Both the Journal and Fox News are controlled by the pro-Trump Murdoch family, whose patriarch Rupert Murdoch served on the board of Philip Morris from 1989 to 1998; Philip Morris executives in turn have served on the board of Murdochs News Corp.

To think that in 1854, fully 40 years before Robert Koch discovered the bacterium that causes cholera, a lone London obstetrician named John Snow identified the source of a cholera outbreak with pencil, paper, and shoe leather.

By interviewing surviving family members of many of the more than 500 victims, he realized that the fatalities were clustered around a single water pump in Broad Street, from which most of the victims had obtained their household supply.

Countless lives were saved when the pump was ordered shut, over the objections of the water companies, which blamed the cholera epidemic on bad air, or miasma. Religious zealots blamed divine intervention.

Ironically, it was a minister, Rev. Henry Whitehead, who at first contended that the outbreak was not caused by tainted water but by Gods will, who surprised himself to discover that the cause was a soiled diaper emptied into a leaky cesspool near the pump.

More than half a century after the causes of the epidemic of lung cancer and emphysema became known through epidemiologic studies, the tobacco industry, like the water companies of Snows London, insisted that their product was not to blame. They were backed up by administration after administration as the cigaretteand its tax revenuesbecame a mainstay of the economy.

Arguably the best single summary of government policy on smoking came from the United Kingdoms Royal College of Physicians in the 1971 sequel Smoking and Health Now to its pioneering report on smoking and health in 1962: Castigating the government for spending little to educate the public about the dangers of smokinga tenth of the amount spent on traffic safety.

The report dryly observes, It seems that Ministers, while accepting the evidence that cigarette smoking is dangerous to health, are guided in their actions by the view that the risks are regrettable but inevitable consequences of a habit which they believe to be an essential source of revenue.

The economy-over-lives approach to COVID-19 by the current president is reminiscent of other administrations approach to curbing smoking.

College football, get out there and play football, Trump said on Aug. 11, when the only major universities left whose officials had given the season a green lightin the Atlantic Coast and Southeastern conferencesare located in the very region with the least adherence to personal COVID-19 health precautions and a steady rise in the number of cases.

By his masks-be-damned rallies and his tweets to Liberate Michigan! and other battleground states with Democratic governors from the inconvenience of wearing a mask and washing hands, Trump has become a 21st century Typhoid Mary, a super-spreader of COVID-19 through his crowded campaign rallies.

By stoking the embers of anti-scientific thinking for years in regard to the safest and most effective vaccines, by mocking the wearing of masks and social distancing, and by claiming that there is a COVID-19 vaccine just around the corner, Trump has undermined confidence in the safety and efficacy of any such rushed-out vaccine by those who would normally support vaccination.

In addition, HHS and FDA have been corrupted by political pressure to approve hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma as treatments for COVID-19 in spite of the absence of safety data. Fauci has been told to refrain from stating that children can transmit COVID-19. And CDC has been forced to walk back recommendations on school reopening and contact tracing, and its venerable publication, MMWR has been censored by the administration.

On June 23, Financial Times published the marvelously understated headline, Resistance is low at U.S. disease-control body. This week we finally learned that the source of this chaos and the sharp decline in the publics and health professionals confidence in the CDC has been a troubled Trump appointee, Michael Caputo, a far-right conspiracy-monger and protg of convicted felon Roger Stone.

It is dj vu all over again. In 1987, one of us (AB) would be told upon assuming a faculty position at Baylor College of Medicine that he could not use his academic affiliation when speaking publicly on smoking and that he should consider getting into something more socially acceptable, like cocaine.

This meant, of course, that studying illicit drugsnot cigaretteswas where the grant funding wasand dont you keep messing with the folks at the tobacco companies who have influence over Capitol Hill and the NIH!

One year later, he would be offered the editorship of the journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Family Physiciancontingent on his not speaking publicly on the subject of smoking.

The AAFP was a recipient of advertising revenue from food subsidiaries of RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris. AB turned down the job.

What is the fairest way to compare strategies to contain the virus with the efforts to reduce cigarette smoking? Why not begin with those who are made ill by a known agent through no fault of their own, as well as through willfully misleading directives by elected officials?

The turning point in the effort to reduce cigarette smoking came in the early 1980s, when studies in Japan and Greece found that long-term exposure to cigarette smoke could cause lung cancer in a person who did not smoke.

Certainly, those individuals who were involuntarily exposed to cigarette smoke over many years at the workplace and who developed terminal lung cancer or emphysema would be unequivocal innocent victims of smoking.

What about those who contract COVID-19?

The only ones in this population who arent unequivocally innocent victims are those who refuse to wear masks, practice physical distancing, wash hands frequently, and refrain from participating in social gatherings, political rallies, or protest demonstrations.

Another way to look at smoking-related deaths is through the number of those who had chosen to continue to smoke in spite of knowing that it could kill them.

One could argue that nicotine addiction is too powerful to overcome, and that, therefore, all of the blame must be laid at the feet of tobacco industry executives and the leaders of allied businesses that have engaged in the promotion of cigarettes in spite of the dangers.

But what about the accountability of public health agencies, which are tasked both with curbing infectious outbreaks and improving the health of the entire population? If a commissioner of health were found to have failed to allocate funds to mosquito control after an outbreak of West Nile, dengue, St. Louis encephalitis, or zika, then that individual would be held partially responsible for the cases that resultedand criminally negligent if the funds were deliberately withheld because the commissioner didnt believe that mosquitoes were the vector, or if he or she pocketed the money.

Analogously, why shouldnt a health commissioner or health agency that chooses not to allocate funding to discourage smoking be held accountable for a failure to reduce tobacco-related deaths and diseases and/or cigarette consumption? Fanciful? But if the number one avoidable cause of death and disease in the health district doesnt receive sufficient funding, then why shouldnt there be accountability?

Although Surgeon General Luther Terry called for appropriate remedial action on smoking in 1964, it would be fully 25 years before every state had even a single individual assigned to reduce smoking.

Nor were health department commissioners permitted to endorse efforts to pass clean indoor air regulations to protect nonsmokers.

And what about academia, organized medicine, and the voluntary health organizations, such as the American Cancer Society? What did they do as the battles over restrictions on cigarette advertising heated up in the 1980s? Most were nowhere to be found.

Individual tobacco product liability lawsuits brought against the tobacco industry beginning in 1983 by New Jersey attorney Mark Edell (Cipollone v Liggett Tobacco Group Inc.), followed by class action suits brought by several state attorneys general in the mid-1990s, began to expose the myth of organized medicine as an enemy of Big Tobacco.

In a TV interview in 1996, the president of the American Medical Association, Lonnie Bristow, famously claimed, We were duped.

This is in spite of the AMA having accepted cigarette ads in its journal from the early-1930s to the mid-1950s, the same time period when the epidemiological and pathological research showing the association between smoking and disease was being published.

This was also in spite of the publication of the Surgeon Generals Report in 1964, following which the AMA, as noted here, spent 14 years conducting research funded by the tobacco industry in lieu of taking action or even calling for action against smoking, apart from advising the public not to smoke in bed.

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Seeing COVID-19 through a cloud of cigarette smoke The Cancer Letter - The Cancer Letter

The pandemic has been an all-hands-on-deck situation for health care. That has meant channeling the brainpower and energy of those who are just starting their careers in medicine: medical students.

Medical students have contributed in the clinical realm, through volunteer work and through embracing challenges in the digital health realm. That has been evident in the work done by Sling Health, an innovation incubator led by medical students and engineering students. The incubator aims to bridge the divide between clinicians and clinical problems.

A recent episode of the AMA COVID-19 Update highlights the way in which student innovation has driven solutions during the pandemic.

For students interested in contributing to innovation during the pandemicand with most internship and development opportunities limitedSling Health offered a digital boot camp. Vithika Nag, a graduate student at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, was among the attendees.

It was very fast paced, but I think the pressure kept us all on a really good timeline, kept us really productive, so it was just a very rewarding experience, she said. At the end of every week, we had some design reviews as well that kept us on a really nice milestone, and just checking all the things off our list.

Here's how medical student entrepreneurs can find out whether their idea has investor appeal.

Avik Som, MD, is co-founder of CareSignal Health. Both he and his company are Sling Health alumni. The pandemic forced CareSignala digital health company that focuses on deviceless remote patient monitoringto adapt on the fly.

When COVID really struck the United States, we rapidly saw that there was an immediate need among clinicians and hospital systems to get information out there for patients that are potentially experiencing some variation of symptoms, Dr. Som said. We generated, effectively, a text messaging support line, something we call the COVID Suite, and that we ended up giving for free to anyone.

Some medical students may be hesitant to get involved in innovation during their undergraduate medical training. Dr. Som advises students not to let their place in the pecking order work as a deterrent.

As a student, it can sometimes be very intimidating to go into clinic and make the claim, or think, that you can make it better, he said. The game is: Be proactive and don't ever be intimidated by titles. Don't be intimidated by all of the venture capital firms versus the chief medical officers. I found out as a student that just asking questions and bringing itpeople are so excited for the initiative and everybody wants to make it better for the patients.

The AMA has curateda selection of resourcesto assist residents, medical students and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic to help manage the shifting timelines, cancellations and adjustments to testing, rotations and other events at this time.

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How medical students are innovating during COVID-19 - American Medical Association

Newswise The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Department of Medicines Clinical Trials Office in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim today announced the first patient has enrolled in a new clinical study to investigate the effect of nintedanib in adult patients having acute lung injury following COVID-19 infection.

A significant percentage of COVID-19 patients with acute lung injury may develop lung fibrosis based on clinical observations, said Maria Padilla, M.D., primary investigator, director of the Advanced Lung & Interstitial Lung Disease Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Our team of researchers and our partner Boehringer Ingelheim share a commitment to improving outcomes in this vulnerable patient population.

The study, called ENDCOV-I (Early Nintedanib Deployment in COVID-19 Interstitial Fibrosis) [NCT04619680], is a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine to investigate the development and course of pulmonary fibrosis in 120 patients receiving nintedanib or placebo who have acute lung injury secondary to COVID-19 infection, and who required invasive or noninvasive respiratory support.

The primary endpoint of the study is percent change in forced vital capacity (FVC), a measurement of lung function, compared to baseline over six months (180 days). Secondary endpoints include change from baseline FVC at 90 days, death within 90 days and 180 days from enrollment due to respiratory or any cause and qualitative and quantitative change in chest CT fibrosis score graded by blinded chest radiologists.

Boehringer Ingelheim is committed to fighting COVID-19 and proud to partner with Mount Sinai on this important clinical initiative, said Craig Conoscenti, M.D., medical expert, Interstitial Lung Disease Medical Leader, Chronic Fibrosing ILD Program, Clinical Development and Medical Affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim. The insights gained from this collaborative research program will help our understanding patients at high risk of pulmonary fibrosis in the COVID-19 patient population.

Boehringer Ingelheim is committed to fighting COVID-19 and proud to partner with Mount Sinai on this important clinical initiative, said Craig Conoscenti, M.D., medical expert, Interstitial Lung Disease Medical Leader, Chronic Fibrosing ILD Program Clinical Development and Medical Affairs, Boehringer Ingelheim. The insights that we learn from this collaborative research program will be critical to understanding whether treatment can help patients at high risk of pulmonary complications resulting from COVID-19.

Mount Sinais commitment against COVID-19Throughout the course of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York, Mount Sinai has been at the forefront of understanding, researching and treating the disease. We have helped large numbers of people recover from the virus, and we have learned and enhanced the knowledge of this infection and manifestations along the way. We have recognized the multi-systemic nature of the disease and the lingering effects that continue to impact the patients. This has led to the establishment of the multidisciplinaryCenter For Post-COVID Care. We are committed to bringing information as it comes to light and to pursue investigation and scientifically based modalities of treatment and care.

Find out what Mount Sinai researchers, doctors, and service providers are learning and doing about the novel coronavirushere.

BI commitment against COVID-19As a research-driven company, Boehringer Ingelheim is part of the collective effort in fighting COVID-19. Drawing from its areas of scientific expertise, the company has engaged in a number of activities to find medical solutions to this pandemic, working closely with academic researchers, international institutions, and others in the pharma industry.

Boehringer Ingelheim is currently involved in a broad set of initiatives to fight the disease and save patients lives, including the research and development of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies that can neutralize the virus, small molecules to inhibit its replication, and therapy development to prevent microcoagulation (blood clots). The company recently began aPhase 2 clinical trialof a novel, targeted therapy to help people with severe respiratory illness from COVID-19.

Boehringer Ingelheim is also an active participant in the global access initiative with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as global development initiatives including the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator (CTA) and the CARE Consortium.

About nintedanibNintedanib is approved in the U.S. for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and available as Ofev. In September 2019, nintedanib was approved in the U.S. to slow the rate of decline in pulmonary function in patients with SSc-ILD, and then in March 2020 to treat chronic fibrosing ILDs with a progressive phenotype.

About The Mount Sinai Department of Medicine Clinical Trials Office (MCTO)Established in 2004, the mission of the MCTO is to provide centralized services for infrastructure and operational support to carry out industry and multicenter network clinical trials with the partnership of the Department of Medicine faculty. The staff have clinical research expertise to provide institutional and federal guidelines for clinical research.

For more information about this study, please emailENDCOVI@mssm.eduor call 646-819-1662.

About Boehringer IngelheimMaking new and better medicines for humans and animals is at the heart of what we do. Our mission is to create breakthrough therapies that change lives. Since its founding in 1885, Boehringer Ingelheim is independent and family-owned. We have the freedom to pursue our long-term vision, looking ahead to identify the health challenges of the future and targeting those areas of need where we can do the most good.

As a world-leading, research-driven pharmaceutical company, more than 51,000 employees create value through innovation daily for our three business areas: Human Pharma, Animal Health, and Biopharmaceutical Contract Manufacturing. In 2019, Boehringer Ingelheim achieved net sales of around $21.3 billion (19 billion euros). Our significant investment of over $3.9 billion (3.5 billion euros) in R&D drives innovation, enabling the next generation of medicines that save lives and improve quality of life.

We realize more scientific opportunities by embracing the power of partnership and diversity of experts across the life-science community. By working together, we accelerate the delivery of the next medical breakthrough that will transform the lives of patients now, and in generations to come.

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Ridgefield, CT, is the largest U.S. subsidiary of Boehringer Ingelheim Corporation and is part of the Boehringer Ingelheim group of companies. In addition, there are Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health in Duluth, GA and Boehringer Ingelheim Fremont, Inc. in Fremont, CA.

Boehringer Ingelheim is committed to improving lives and strengthening our communities. Please visit http://www.boehringer-ingelheim.us/csr to learn more about Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.

For more information, please visit http://www.boehringer-ingelheim.us, or follow us on Twitter@BoehringerUS.

About the Mount Sinai Health SystemThe Mount Sinai Health System is New York City's largest academic medical system, encompassing eight hospitals, a leading medical school, and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York region. Mount Sinai is a national and international source of unrivaled education, translational research and discovery, and collaborative clinical leadership ensuring that we deliver the highest quality carefrom prevention to treatment of the most serious and complex human diseases. The Health System includes more than 7,200 physicians and features a robust and continually expanding network of multispecialty services, including more than 400 ambulatory practice locations throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 14 onU.S. News & World Report's"Honor Roll" of the Top 20 Best Hospitals in the country and the Icahn School of Medicine as one of the Top 20 Best Medical Schools in country. Mount Sinai Health System hospitals are consistently ranked regionally by specialty and our physicians in the top 1% of all physicians nationally byU.S. News & World Report.

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Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Boehringer Ingelheim Collaborate on First Study to Evaluate nintedanib in Patients with Fibrosing ILD...

The Athens City-County Health Department, in collaboration with Ohio University, will use the newly opened headquarters of the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine as its primary site for administering COVID-19 vaccinations, Health Department Administrator Jack Pepper said.

Beginning on Friday, the first of the new year, the department will begin immunizations at Heritage Hall, a medical education facility located on West Union Street near the Shafer Street intersection.

We are grateful to Ohio University for the quick planning that will allow us to offer vaccines toPhase 1a recipientsin Athens County, Pepper said in a university press release. We value the continued collaboration, which will provide a facility to help our department administer the vaccine as quickly as possible.

Local health departments are primarily tasked by the state with vaccinating EMS responders and health care workers who arent necessarily on the frontline, including dentists and hospice workers.

Theyre also responsible for inoculating residents and staff of long-term care facilities that arent enrolled in the federal governments plan to vaccinate them though a number of private pharmacies.

The health department last week received 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine, 190 of which were immediately given to Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare, a psychiatric hospital for mentally ill adults in southeast Ohio. It received an additional 100 doses of the Moderna vaccine Monday, but doesnt expect more shipments until Jan 11, Pepper said.

The department also began immunizing EMS workers and select congregate care facilities last week at the Athens Community Center. Athens County EMS employs 66 people who are all eligible to receive the vaccine.

To date 505 Athens County residents, less than 1 percent of the population, have received their first of two doses of a vaccine, according to The Ohio Department of Health.

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Health department to use new Ohio University medical school site for immunizations - Athens NEWS

When President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19, many Americans noticed that his physician had the title D.O. stitched onto his white coat. Much confusion ensued about doctors of osteopathic medicine. As of a 2018 census, they made up 9.1% of physicians in the United States. How do they fit into the broader medical field?

Andrea Amalfitano is a D.O. and dean of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine. He explains some of the foundations of the profession and its guiding principle: to use holistic approaches to care for and guide patients. And dont worry, yes, D.O.s are real doctors and have full practice rights across the U.S.

In the years after the Civil War, without antibiotics and vaccines, many clinicians of the day relied on techniques like arsenic, castor oil, mercury and bloodletting to treat the ill. Unsanitary surgical practices were standard. These treatments promised cures but often led to more sickness and pain.

In response to that dreadful state of affairs, a group of American physicians founded the osteopathic medical profession. They asserted that maintaining wellness and preventing disease was paramount. They believed that preserving health was best achieved via a holistic medical understanding of the individual patients, their families and their communities in mind, body and spirit. They rejected reductionist interactions meant to rapidly address only acute symptoms or problems.

They also embraced the concept that the human body has an inherent capacity to heal itself decades before the immune systems complexities were understood and called for this ability to be respected and harnessed.

Doctors of osteopathic medicine D.O.s, for short can prescribe medication and practice all medical and surgical specialties just as their M.D. counterparts do. Because of the focus on preserving wellness rather than waiting to treat symptoms as they arise, more than half of D.O.s gravitate to primary care, including family practice and pediatrics, particularly in rural and underserved areas.

D.O. training embraces the logic that understanding anatomic structures can allow one to better understand how they function. For example, alongside contemporary medical and surgical preventive and treatment knowledge, all osteopathic physicians also learn strategies to treat musculoskeletal pain and disease. These techniques are known as manual medicine, or osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT). They can provide patients an alternative to medications, including opioids, or invasive surgical interventions.

D.O.s pride themselves on making sure their patients feel theyre treated as a whole person and not simply reduced to a symptom or blood test to be rapidly dealt with and then dismissed. We say we aspire to care for people, not patients, with an empathetic attitude and an emphasis on making sure those closest to those in their care, such as family and loved ones, as well as other social factors, are all taken into account.

The osteopathic philosophy around prevention and wellness might seem like common sense today, but it was revolutionary. Aspects of osteopathic medicine, including the use of alternative therapies such as OMT, were originally met with skepticism or outright hostility by some medical doctors who questioned their scientific bases. Indeed, in 1961, the American Medical Associations code of ethics declared it unethical for an M.D. physician to professionally associate with doctors of osteopathy.

So with the guidance of the American Osteopathic Association, D.O.s created their own D.O. hospitals, residency and fellowship programs, and four-year D.O. degree-granting medical schools. Instruction around the current science of health and illness is similar between D.O.s and M.D.s its the philosophical delivery of that knowledge thats different.

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Certainly a holistic approach to health is no longer exclusive to D.O.s. In fact, many M.D., nursing, physician assistant and other health professional schools now embrace parts of it as they deliver care. And now, D.O.s and M.D.s often work side by side in medical settings across the country. More recently, the AMA has recently recognized the D.O. licensing exams as equivalent to the exams M.D.s take. D.O.s compete for the same training residencies as M.D.s and, eventually, the same jobs.

Osteopathic medicine is now one of the fastest-growing health professions, with over 150,000 D.O.s and D.O. medical students practicing in the U.S. and internationally. One in four newly minted U.S. physicians in the class of 2019 graduated from an osteopathic medical school.

Osteopathic medicine is now a mainstay of contemporary medical practice, with D.O.s active in all aspects of the nations health care systems.

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What is osteopathic medicine? A D.O. explains - The Conversation US

Transparency Market Research (TMR) has published a new report on the medical education market for the period of 20192027. According to the report, the globalmedical education marketwas valued at nearly US$ 31 Bn in 2018, and is projected to expand at a CAGR of more than 4% from 2019 to 2027. Rise in the number of medical schools and increase in cost of medical education are the major factors expected to drive the global medical education market from 2019 to 2027.

Increase in Number of Medical Schools to Drive the Medical Education Market

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Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Siemens Healthineers to Lead the Global Medical Education Market

The report provides the profiles of leading players operating in the global medical education market. These include Gundersen Health System, GE Healthcare Institute, American College of Radiology, Healthcare Training Institute, New Jersey, Olympus America, TACT Academy for clinical training, Zimmer Biomet Institute, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Apollo Hospitals, CAE Healthcare, and Siemens Healthineers.

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Medical Education Market projected to expand at a CAGR of more than 4% from 2019 to 2027 - The Think Curiouser

First year students at Harvard Medical School will join upperclassmen on campus this spring, Dean George Q. Daley 82 said in an interview Friday.

We decided that we will bring the students back for the spring semester and have them return to some of these in-person, patient-oriented, clinical examination skill building, he said.

Hands-on experience in the clinic working directly with patients is key to students training, according to Daley: after returning students restarted their clinical rotations in the summer, they have integrated as essential members of healthcare delivery teams at various hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

The decision to return all medical students to Longwood contrasts with recent moves at many of Harvards other professional schools. The Law School, School of Public Health, Divinity School, and Graduate School of Design each announced they had elected to continue virtual classes last week.

Daley said that split stems from the Medical Schools unique charge.

In many ways, we have a different mission than a lot of other schools. Our mission of education also includes service service to the patients that these students will ultimately be treating for their careers as physicians, Daley said.

Several first-year students said they found classroom learning effective in a virtual format. They said the clinical courses Daley referenced, however, went less smoothly.

[The instructors] are doing the best they can, and they've adopted well, but there are some things you truly can't learn online for medicine, first-year Medical School student Abigail M. Kempf told The Crimson earlier this month.

Recognizing those challenges, Daley said the school made the decision to bring back additional students with care.

We're doing it with a tremendous amount of forethought and planning, he said. This has required, again, a tremendous collaborative effort across our students and our staff and our faculty, in order to be sure that we can do this as safely as possible.

Staff writer Virginia L. Ma can be reached at virginia.ma@thecrimson.com.

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First-Year Harvard Medical Students Will Return to Campus for the Spring | News - Harvard Crimson

It took Carrie Wanamaker several days to connect the face she saw on GoFundMe with the young woman she had met a few years before.

According to the fundraising site, Adeline Fagan, a 28-year-old resident OB-GYN, had developed a debilitating case of Covid-19 and was on a ventilator in Houston.

Scrolling through her phone, Wanamaker found the picture she took of Fagan in 2018, showing the fourth-year medical student at her side in the delivery room, beaming at Wanamakers pink, crying, minutes-old daughter. Fagan supported Wanamakers leg through the birth because the epidural paralyzed her below the waist, and they joked and laughed since Wanamaker felt loopy from the anesthesia.

I didnt expect my delivery to go that way, Wanamaker, a pediatric dentist in upstate New York, said. You always hear about it being the woman screaming and cursing at her husband, but it wasnt like that at all. We just had a really great time. She made it a really special experience for me.

Fagans funeral took place on Saturday.

The physician tested positive for the virus in early July and died on 19 September after spending over two months in hospital. She had worked in a Houston emergency department, and a family member says she reused personal protective equipment (PPE) day after day due to shortages.

Fagan is one of over 250 medical staff who died in southern and western hotspot states as the virus surged there over the summer, according to reporting by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News as part of Lost on the Frontline, a project to track every US healthcare worker death. In Texas, nine medical deaths in April soared to 33 in July, after Governor Greg Abbott hastily pushed to reopen the state for business and then reversed course.

Among the deceased healthcare workers who have so far been profiled in depth by the Lost on the Frontline team, about a dozen nationwide, including Fagan, were under the age of 30. The median age of death from Covid for medical staff is 57, compared to 78 in the general population. Around one-third of the deaths involved concerns over inadequate PPE. Protective equipment shortages are devastating for healthcare workers because they are at least three times more likely to become infected than the general population.

It kicked me in the gut, said Wanamaker. This is not what was supposed to happen. She was supposed to go out there and live her dreams and finally be able to enjoy her life after all these years of studying.

Fagan worked at a hospital called HCA Houston Healthcare West, and had moved to Texas in 2019 after completing medical school in Buffalo, New York, a few hours from her hometown of LaFayette.

She was the second of four sisters, all pursuing or considering careers in the medical field. Her younger sibling, Maureen, 23, said she dealt with patients in uncomfortable or embarrassing situations with grace, as she had observed when she accompanied her on two medical mission trips to Haiti. Addie was very much, Do you understand? Do you have other questions? I will go over this with you a million times if need be.

Maureen also mentioned Fagans comic side she was voted by her colleagues most likely to be found skipping and singing down the hall to a delivery and prone to rolling out hammy Scottish and English accents.

Fagan loved delivering babies, loved being part of the happy moment when a baby comes into the world, loved working with mothers, said Dori Marshall, associate dean at the University at Buffalo medical school. But she found living by herself in Houston lonely, and in February Maureen moved down to keep her company; she could just as easily prepare for her own medical school entrance exam in Texas.

It is unclear how Fagan contracted coronavirus, but to Maureen it seemed linked to her July rotation in the ER. HCA West is part of HCA Healthcare the countrys largest hospital chain and in recent months a national nurses union has complained of its willful violation of workplace safety protocols, including pushing infected staff to continue clocking in.

Amid national shortages, Maureen said her sister faced a particular challenge with PPE. Adeline had an N95 mask and had her name written on it, she said. Adeline wore the same N95 for weeks and weeks, if not months and months.

The CDC recommends that an N95 mask should be reused at most five times, unless a manufacturer says otherwise. HCA West said it would not comment specifically on Maureens allegations, but the facilitys chief medical officer, Dr Emily Sedgwick, said the hospitals policies did not involve constantly reusing masks.

Our protocol, based on CDC guidance, includes colleagues turning in their N95 masks at the conclusion of each shift, and receiving another mask at the beginning of their next shift. A spokesperson for HCA West, Selena Mejia, also said that hospital staff were heartbroken by Fagans death.

On 8 July, Fagan arrived home with body aches, a headache and a fever, and a Covid test came back positive. For a week the sisters quarantined, and Fagan, who had asthma, used her nebulizer. But her breathing difficulties persisted, and one afternoon Maureen noticed that her sisters lips were blue, and insisted they go to hospital.

For two weeks the hospital attempted to supplement Fagans failing lungs with oxygen. She grew so weak she wasnt able to hold her phone up or even keep her head upright. She was transferred to another hospital where she agreed to be put on a ventilator.

Less than a day later, she was hooked up to an ECMO device for a highly invasive treatment of last resort, in which blood is removed from the body via surgically implanted intravenous tubes, artificially oxygenated and then returned.

She lingered in this state through August, an experience documented on a blog by her software engineer father, Brant, who arrived in Houston with her mother, Mary Jane, a retired special education teacher, even though they were not allowed to visit Fagan.

The medical team tried to wean her off the machines and the nine sedatives she was at one point receiving, but as she emerged from unconsciousness she became anxious, and was put back under to stop her from pulling out the tubes snaking into her body. She was able to respond to instructions to wiggle her toes. A nurse told Brant she might be suffering from ICU psychosis, a delirium caused by a prolonged stay in intensive care.

The family tried to speak with her daily. The nurse told us that they have seen Adelines eyes tear up after we have been talking to her on the phone, Brant wrote. So it must be having some impact.

On 15 September, her parents were at last permitted to visit. I do not think we were prepared for what we saw, in person, when we entered her room, he wrote. Occasionally, Adeline would try to respond, shake her head or mouth a word or two. But her stare was glassy and you were not sure if she was in there.

It was too much for him. Being the softy that cannot stand it when one of my girls is hurting, [I] commenced to get light-headed and pass out.

Finally, on 17 September, it seemed Fagan was turning a corner. Still partly sedated, she was nevertheless able to sit up without support. She mouthed the words to a song, being unable to sing because a tracheostomy prevented air passing over her vocal cords.

The next day, the ECMO tubes were removed. The day after that, Brant made his last post.

His daughter had suffered a massive brain haemorrhage, possibly because her vascular system had been weakened by the virus. Patients on ECMO also take high doses of blood thinners to prevent clots.

A neurosurgeon said that even on the remote chance Fagan survived surgery, she would be profoundly brain damaged.

We spent the remaining minutes hugging, comforting and talking to Adeline, Brant wrote.

And then the world stopped

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Texas doctor, 28, dies of Covid: 'She wore the same mask for weeks, if not months' - The Guardian

This study is also being conduction nationally, which will enroll about 2,000 people.

DULUTH, Minn. The experimental treatment recently given to President Donald Trump for his diagnosis with COVID-19 will soon be part of a study being conducted at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

The particular drug treatment is made up of two identical antibodies, which are created in a lab.

The antibodies are expected to bind to the virus to help prevent it from attacking other cells in the body.

The U of M Medical School study will test the cocktail on people who have no symptoms, but have come in contact with people who were positive for COVID-19.

These are people we know have been exposed and are at higher risk of getting sick, but arent sick yet. What we are hoping to find out in my study is whether we can prevent them from becoming ill, said Anne-Marie Leuke, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and international medicine at the U of M Medical School.

The study is in partnership with a New York-based pharmaceutical company, which created the treatment.

The U of M Medical School has yet to start the trial, but plans to enroll about 100 people.

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Experimental COVID-19 Treatment Given To President Trump Part of Study At U of M Medical School - FOX 21 Online

Fast Forward Medical Innovation (FFMI), a unit of the Medical School Office of Research, has awarded a combined $3.3 million in funding to four biomedical research projects in the inaugural round of the Frankel Innovation Initiative - a $20 million gift from the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation to support the research and development of life-saving therapies at Michigan Medicine, in collaboration with other institutions.

The winning projects are U-M faculty-led, cover a range of disciplines, and have the potential for rapid clinical application and groundbreaking impact.

The projects focus on biomedical innovations that could quickly advance cutting-edge therapies and bring novel approaches to improving health into the hands of clinicians and scientists. Funded projects include:

Researchers presented their proposals to the Frankels and a Scientific Advisory Committee of world-renowned scientists and technology development professionals external to U-M.

We were extremely impressed with the high-caliber projects presented at the Frankel Innovation Initiative selection meeting, says Thomas F. Bumol, Ph.D., Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Executive Vice President of the Allen Institute, and Director of the Allen Institute for Immunology in Seattle. U-M is a leader in translational medicine and at the forefront of biomedical innovation. We believe the winning projects possess the potential to have a tremendous impact on health and patient care around the world.

In addition to providing their expertise and guidance to the Frankel investigators, the committee will leverage their combined experience to harness the creative ingenuity of the investigators and help direct the translation from cutting-edge innovation to life-saving medical practice.

The Frankel Innovation Initiative is designed to build on best practices of the standout programs developed at U-M and other top institutions, and capitalizes on U-Ms extensive biomedical research enterprise as the top public university in research spending in the United States. The $20 million gift will be used to fund four to seven projects annually, with each project receiving between $250,000 $1 million.

This very generous gift from the Frankels will take these four innovative projects to the next level, says Marschall S. Runge, M.D., Ph.D. The foresight and funding of this initiative will provide the critical support needed for these investigators to quickly move their innovations in areas of great patient need.

The Initiative is administered by Fast Forward Medical Innovation, a group at Michigan Medicine that has the proven expertise and unique resources to work with faculty to bring together biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship and achieve life-saving results.

FFMI offers resources and support to world-class biomedical researchers at the university and across the state. This unit at U-M provides groundbreaking funding programs, dynamic educational offerings, and deep industry connections that help biomedical researchers navigate the road to successful innovation and commercialization, with the ultimate goal of positively impacting human health.For more information about FFMI,click here.

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Projects Awarded $3.3 Million by Frankel Innovation Initiative - University of Michigan Health System News

Implanted medical devices can be used to treat a number of medical conditions, including regulating heart function or delivering electrical stimulation to targeted areas of the brain to treat essential tremors caused by Parkinsons disease. A new implantable device, to be designed and developed by scientists at the University of Minnesota Medical School, may be able to help treat common but serious mental illnesses like depression and PTSD.

A team of researchers, led by Alik Widge, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Universitys Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has been awarded a $6.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop the device, which would use electrical impulses to help misfiring brain rhythms fall into synchrony.

In a departure from the pace of typical academic research, this team which includes Widge; Greg Molnar, Ph.D., a medical device expert and associate professor in the Universitys Department of Neurosurgery; and Mahsa Shoaran, Ph.D., of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland has put the implant project on the fast track. They hope to have a device that is ready for first in-human use in as little as six years.

The size of the grant points to the projects promise, Widge said: The National Institute of Mental Health doesnt normally give out this kind of money. $6.6 million is a large grant for still a relatively junior professor.

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The grant, Widge said, is a vote of confidence for his team, which includes clinicians who understand the problem and an expert with deep background making and bringing to market next-gen medical devices. And, he added, the fact that the medical school is located in the Twin Cities gives his project an edge: We are the Silicon Valley of implantable medical devices.

Dr. Alik Widge

When Widge approached him with his idea, Molnar was immediately enthusiastic about its prospects.

Its a big deal, he said. It is the first grant Ive seen at the University that is truly focused on translation. This is not pie-in-the-sky long-horizon academic research, Molnar added. The end result of this project will be a device that has the potential to change the way mental illness is treated. The deliverable is going to be a working first-in-human-ready closed-loop deep-brain stimulation system. Thats impressive.

The technology for treating brain disease with implantable devices already exists: For many years, for instance, people with Parkinsons disease have been treating the debilitating tremors and other symptoms associated with the disease with a device called a neurostimulator that delivers electrical stimulation to areas of the nervous system that control movement, blocking abnormal electrical signals.

A Parkinsons neurostimulator works much like a heart pacemaker. Widge explained that his device, while it will be able to use much of the hardware designed for other implantable devices, will require specific custom electronics to work on a different, more targeted level.

This is a new mechanism of action different from anything on the market, he said. This is something that is designed to get at the biology of mental illness in a way that wasnt possible before.

Widge and his colleagues see mental illness largely as a physical disease of the brain that can be treated by altering the way different parts of the brain communicate with each other.

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Most mental illness addiction, PTSD, depression, anxiety, OCD all of these conditions in different ways are caused by breakdowns or in some cases too much communication between certain parts of the brain in certain sub-networks, he said. His teams device will use targeted electrical stimulation to help build healthy connections between different areas of the brain.

Widge likes to use computer metaphors to explain his device. If you have a program on your computer or phone that goes a little bit rogue, it cant let go of whatever resource it is using, he said. You get that spinning beach ball and the whole system blocks up. If you can just fix that one thing thats causing the problem, if we can close that one small program and make a little tweak, the whole system can get back into alignment and function better.

By taking this direct, physical approach, Widges device has the potential to upend the way mental illness is treated.

Greg Molnar

The U of Ms proposed device will use existing implantable device technology, but will require unique custom electronics to deliver targeted electrical impulses to the brain, Widge said.

Deep-brain stimulation hardware that was developed to treat Parkinsons disease cant do what we need it to do. It wasnt designed for that. It was built off a rewired cardiac pacemaker. We have the stimulation hardware, but we dont have the right signal processing yet.

His team will be involved in developing custom circuitry to precisely time stimulation relative to ongoing brain activity.

If the brain rhythms are in synch, one area is getting ready to fire as the volume of information comes in from the first, Widge explained, switching mid-stream to a sports metaphor. Think about the receiver or outfielder who knows when the ball is going to be coming to him and is standing there ready to catch it. The catch is effortless and they are right there where they need to be. Thats what brain synchrony does.

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While Widge is confident that mental illness can be treated with implantable electrical stimulation, he credits Molnar with helping him understand that his project could be developed and delivered in record time.

Widge had been working in an animal lab for years, experimenting with stimulation patterns that can achieve the kind of communication between brain networks that is needed for his device. One day, he was talking to Molnar, explaining that he knows his device can work in rats but he didnt know how to take the next step of getting it to work in humans.

Molnar, with his deep background working in the implantable device industry and consulting with Minnesota companies specializing in developing the technology, was enthusiastic about Widges idea. He told Widge, whod been lured to the U of M from Harvard and MIT, that Minnesota was the perfect place to see his project through to completion.

Greg said, We have four contract medical device manufacturers in the Twin Cities alone, Widge recalled. He explained that in our ecosystem in this state, what weve got is a set of companies that have the individual parts of an implantable neurostimulator on their shelves ready to mix and match. This is where the Only in Minnesota story comes in.

Once Widge and his colleagues develop the custom electronics needed for their device, Molnar explained, theyll have their pick of medical device manufacturers primed to take the next step.

All these companies do is wait for someone to come up to them and say, I have a new medical device idea. I need a prototype made, Widge said. Once we build that one chip that runs the device, the rest is all available off the shelf. We just need to pick the right manufacturing partner to integrate our innovation with what they know how to do up to FDA standards.

Support from the University of Minnesotas MnDRIVE initiative aimed at boosting academic research and development in the states medical technology industry also gives Widge and Molnar hope that their device can be developed and tested in a relatively short period of time.

That kind of support, Widge said, is why I moved here. I was at Harvard and MIT before I came here, but they could not do what we can do here in Minnesota. This would not have happened if I had stayed in Boston.

That kind of overwhelming support for research, Molnar added, will help the team move their research to practical application in record time.

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This isnt your classic, Lets do this for five years, more research is needed, academic project, he said. This is taking discovery and literally, with my expertise, putting it into hardware.

At Medtronic, Molnar said, We dealt in reality. We wanted to make a product. With this project, the opportunity for collaboration with academia and industry is going to make this grant real.

Widge said that having Molnar on his team makes him feel that an accelerated timeline for his devices development is achievable. At the end of this grant I think well be ready for the animal test that will make it ready for the first in-human in five years. Thats warp speed for the medical device industry.

Widges optimistic clinician hat tells him that odds are the first version of the device the team builds will work. But that process will take a few years. You have to first test it in a pig or a sheep, but then it would be ready for human use, he said. My pessimistic research-engineer hat says, Nothing you build will work the first time. You will need to re-build several versions.

That said, Widge remains optimistic that this device could be ready for human use in record time. Im assuming that in six or seven years we will be doing pilot human clinical trials. This is something thats needed by so many people, so I am thrilled to think that it could become a reality in a relatively short time.

A new approach to therapy for people struggling with mental illness is a big, unmet need, Molnar said, and because of this he sees many possible uses for the device going forward.

In the future, he explained, This device will be used for treating depression and all the spectrum of symptoms of mental illness. This will have a huge impact on the quality of life for millions of people.

One group of people who could benefit from his device are those suffering from PTSD, Widge said. In people with PTSD, he explained, there is a part of the brain called the amygdala that is involved with fear and emotion. The prefrontal cortex provides the context. In PTSD, signals from the prefrontal cortex dont get through to the amygdala regardless of context. What we can do with this device is restore that communication, get those two reactions to work together and do what theyre supposed to do.

While the device will help put brain communication back into synch for people suffering from a range of mental illnesses, it will not be a one-and-done therapy. People with the device will still likely need to work with a psychotherapist to understand how best to respond to stress or life change, Widge said: Our system will have to combine with certain forms of talk therapy.

And just like any other implantable device, ongoing care is needed to help patients heal.

This is no different than any other implantable device, Widge said. If you get a knee replacement you will get 3-6 months of physical therapy to help you learn how to walk and strengthen those muscles. Its the same with our device.

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U of M research team hopes to develop an implantable device to treat mental illness thanks to a $6.6 million grant - MinnPost

"Don't worry, the grownups have it figured out."

I was in third grade and terrified. My teacher was teaching us about global warming -- wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, floods -- the destabilization of our ecosystem, the destruction of our future.

I was scared. But I calmed down: "It's OK, the adults will solve it."

Fast-forward to junior year of college. I saw environmental protections torn down, and the United States withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. My parents told me about the red and gray wildfire smoke coloring the Bay Area sky.

The grownups hadn't figured it out. Then who would?

I knew I had to act. In college, I spent thousands of hours organizing with fellow students and stakeholders to design and advocate for climate policy in New Jersey.

When I arrived at Stanford for medical school last year, I wasn't sure at first how to continue my environmental work, but I knew it was important. The environment is health. Ask any doctor who sees their asthmatic patient choking on wildfire smoke.

Last September, while we were studying for our molecular mechanisms final, the Global Climate Strikes happened. My classmates - Adary Zhang, Santiago Sanchez, Ashley Jowell -- and I put together a lunch talk about climate and health.

We talked about the health effects of air pollution, extreme heat, floods. We talked about how environmental disasters are unjust -- that they always hit low-income communities hardest, even if they contributed least to the problem. And we talked about the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and how we cannot reach our climate goals if the health care sector doesn't cut its share.

We decided to form Stanford Climate and Health. We are a group of Stanford medical, physician assistant, graduate, and undergraduate students; residents; staff; and faculty who are all passionate about the intersection of climate and health.

One of our goals is to find workable ways for hospitals and health systems to reduce their emissions and build resilience toward worsening disasters, such as extreme heat, wildfires and air pollution. Taken together, this is known as "climate-smart health care."

We also need to learn more about the health effects of climate change -- the impacts on the lung, the heart, the kidney and the skin; on children, women, and the elderly; on low-income communities and people of color.

So far, we've worked with medical course directors to weave climate change into our curriculum, and we're working on deploying safe and cost-effective reusable gowns at Stanford Health Care. We are also advocating in our professional societies, including the California Medical Association and American Academy of Physician Assistants, to make climate change a priority issue for patient health. We've additionally supported a climate change vulnerability assessment for Santa Clara County.

Our first major event is coming up on Sept. 25. The NorCal Symposium on Climate and Pandemic Resilience in Healthcare is a virtual gathering, co-organized with the University of California, San Francisco, with the aim of inspiring our community to take action toward more sustainable health care.

Speakers include Cheryl Holder, MD, founder of Florida Clinicians for Climate Action and a physician leader combating climate change and other health inequities in underserved communities.Dean Lloyd Minor, MD, and David Entwistle, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care, also will be there, along with leaders from UCSF and the National Resources Defense Council.

We'll have sessions on emissions, disaster resilience, community partnerships, advocacy, food systems, and medical curriculum. We'll welcome sustainability leaders, health professionals, students and community partners from all backgrounds; and we'll encourage them to work with us to take action toward a just and sustainable future.

Because that's how change happens. It takes grown-ups and young people,deans and students, activists and innovators, front-line communities and environmental advocates, and every kind of health professional, working together as a community, to create a world where third graders don't have to worry anymore.

Jonathan Luis a second-year medical student at Stanford who is passionate about addressing climate change and its health impacts. He is a co-leader of Stanford Climate and Health, along withAshley Jowell, Navami JainandNatalie Baker.You can reach them atstanfordclimateandhealth@gmail.com

Top photo by MILKOV. Middle photo by Jonathan Lu.

Original post:
The intersection of climate and health: Stanford group works for change - Scope

Newswise A combination antibody treatment for preventing COVID-19 illness in individuals who have had sustained exposure to someone with the virus is being studied by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The clinical trial is enrolling patients at Harris Health Systems Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

The Phase III, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial will help researchers determine if the laboratory-made dual-antibody treatment, REGN-COV2, can prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in individuals who share a home with someone with a confirmed infection.

If this trial demonstrates that this treatment is effective, it could be used in various settings where exposure risk is heightened, such as health care, airlines, meatpacking factories, nursing homes, and among first responders, saidRoberto C. Arduino, MD, the studys lead investigator and professor of infectious disease withMcGovern Medical Schoolat UTHealth. It is crucial that we discover treatment options that can not only prevent severe illness, but also stop the spread of COVID-19 within our communities.

The study team is seeking to enroll asymptomatic individuals who have had at least 48 hours of sustained exposure to a person with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, known as an index case. Participants must be randomized within 96 hours of the index cases diagnosis. Trial participants must live in the same household as the index case patient for 29 days during the study.

REGN-COV2 is a combination of two monoclonal (laboratory-made) antibodies that target two different sites of the spike protein found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Antibodies are proteins created by the immune system to fight a pathogen or infection. The targeted surface spike protein gives the virus a crown-like appearance and allows it to attach to and enter cells.

The REGN-COV2 antibody cocktail is a combination of antibodies originally isolated from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and produced by mice that have been genetically modified to have human immune systems.

The study period will last 32 weeks. On day one of enrollment, patients will receive four subcutaneous injections of either the trial agent or a placebo. This treatment strategy is known as passive immunization, and is the current strategy used for tetanus, rabies, hepatitis B, and herpes zoster exposures. Participants will be tested for COVID-19 weekly during the first month they are enrolled.

Co-investigators from McGovern Medical School includeKaren J. Vigil, MD, an associate professor of infectious disease and medical director of infection prevention for UT Physicians outpatient operations; andSarah Duong, MD, a general internal medicine physician. Jonatan Gioia, MD, is the program manager.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is sponsoring the clinical trial. For more information, visitClinicalTrials.gov.

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Team assessing if dual-antibody injection prevents COVID-19 illness - Newswise

Luke Schafer: Prioritizing Medical School Over the Games | Morning Chalk Up

Photo Credit: Athletes Eye (instagram.com/athleteseyephotography)

Unassuming.

That is the word best used to describe Luke Schafer and hes totally fine with that. The 2020 CrossFit Games qualifier has other items to worry about right now the Games however are not at the top of that list. Since early July, Schafer has been enrolled in medical school at Still University in Kirksville, Missouri. That has kept him busy and has become his main priority. But nevertheless he has committed to participating in the online portion of the Games on September 18-19, you just wont hear much from him about it.

Remind me: Schafer is not a Games rookie he has made two appearances as a team member in 2015 and then again at last years Games. At last years Games he helped OC3 Black to a fourth place finish. Despite his Games experience on a team he has also competed as an individual including the 2018 and 2018 Central Regionals, finishing eighth and 11th respectively. Altogether he has five Regional appearances including three on a team.

During the 2019 season he competed in four Sanctionals including two as an individual. He started his season with an 18th place at the star-studded Dubai CrossFit Championship before placing seventh at the Granite Games.

For the second-straight year Schafer finished within the top-50 in the Open. He recorded a career-best placing of 46th, a three-spot jump from his 2019 finish.

Enter 2020: Schafer earned his ticket to this years Games after taking second place at the CrossFit Mayhem Classic. He received the invite after Chandler Smith qualified through the Open giving Schafer the backfill spot. Schaefer recorded three top-three finishes at the competition finishing 14 points behind Smith.

Path to the Live Five:Schafer admitted that his training has taken a backseat since starting medical school.

Schafer thrives in grunt-work events, longer workouts and chippers. Workouts that also incorporate running in them is also a strength of his. Schafer may get his wish as running will be incorporated into one of the workouts of the online stage of the Games.

His top finishes at the Mayhem Classicshow that as he finished second in the grueling five-mile ruck-run with a time of 51:00. His other runner-up finish at the Mayhem Classic was in a chipper that included burpee box get-overs, assault bike, GHD sit-ups and bar muscle-ups.

In this years Open his best event was 20.5 where he placed 26th in a workout that featured 40 muscle-ups, 80-cal. Row and 120 wall-balls.

Where Schafer has struggled in the past has been in events that test strength or have heavy loads.

In 20.4 he placed 207th as he just finished under the 20-minute time cap of a workout that ended with five clean and jerks at 315 LBs which is his listed 1-rep max.

Schafer has also historically struggled with workouts that require being upside down. His worst finish at the Mayhem Classic was the 18th in event three, a couplet which included four rounds of 100-feet handstand walks.

In the Open, his worst event was 20.3 where he finished 241st worldwide. 20.3 included handstand pushups and walks along with deadlifts.

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Luke Schafer: Prioritizing Medical School Over the Games - Morning Chalk Up

UNLV School of Medicine third-year student Justin Bauzon was in a psychology course at Las Vegas Advanced Technologies Academy when he became absolutely infatuated with the brain, the organ Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of DNAs structure, called the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

Bauzons fascination wasnt just a high school passing fancy his interest continued to grow as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in neurobiology, the study of the nervous system and the workings of the brain.

Each year, I took every college course I could sign up for that was neuro-related, he said. I was fascinated by the brains complexity and how it could determine the very behaviors and interactions that make us human. I found the idea that there was much we didnt know about the brain so perplexing the lack of truly curative interventions for many brain-related diseases like Alzheimers attests to how much we still have to learn. I saw this gap in knowledge as an opportunity where I could contribute and really make a difference.

With that background in mind, the fact that Bauzon recently became the lead author of an important research articlein the highly respected, peer-reviewed Alzheimers Research & Therapy journal doesnt seem at all unlikely. His teams publicationexamines whether drugs used for one purpose can also be an effective treatment for Alzheimers, a progressive and fatal brain disorder with a long goodbye, one that often reduces sufferers to quarrelsome infancy.

Justin Bauzons paper shows how many repurposed drugs are being tested in Alzheimers disease and where the drugs came from in terms of conditions for which they are already approved, said Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, the former medical director of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas and now director of the Chambers-Grundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience in the UNLV department of brain health. This is an important contribution to understanding Alzheimers drug development and will encourage others to use the repurposing strategy, ultimately resulting in better treatments for patients.

Trials for the repurposing or repositioning of drugs are not unusual. Because they have been previously optimized for efficacy, safety, and bioavailability, considerable investments in research and development can be compressed through repurposing. It is also not unusual for one drug to be effective for more than one disease. Gabapentin, for instance, was originally developed for treating epilepsy and is now an effective pain-killer. Sildenafil, originally developed for treating high blood pressure, is today more often used to treat erectile dysfunction. Drugs created to combat one type of cancer have been found to be effective against other types.

Millions of dollars can be shaved off by bypassing some early trials that drugs go through, Bauzon noted.

Data, he said, is too preliminary to conclude which, if any, of the 58 drugs now in different stages of clinical trials for repurposing will ever be designated as a treatment for Alzheimers. The best that can be said is that some seem to have more potential than others, he said.

Bauzon doubts any one pill will ever be the cure-all for the disease that now affects more than 5 million Americans, robbing people of memory. He believes many therapeutics will be used to mitigate the disease that Americans now fear even more than cancer or heart disease.

Dr. Dale Netski, the UNLV School of Medicine director of medical student research, called Bauzons first-author publication in a very competitive peer-reviewed journal an amazing accomplishment for a third-year medical student. I hope that Justin will continue to work hard to close knowledge gaps, leading to innovative therapeutic approaches to combat Alzheimers.

It was early last summer that Bauzon began what became a year-long study that he carried out with the help of Cummings and former Ruvo Center pharmacist Garam Lee. Given his fascination with the brain, it isnt surprising that Bauzon reached out about possible projects to Cummings, one of the worlds top Alzheimers researchers. In 2014 Cummings released a study that found between 2002-12, the failure rate for drugs developed specifically to treat the disease was a woeful 99.6 percent.

Cummings told Bauzon a drug repurposing study could be of real value.

I found it remarkable how humble Dr. Cummings is, Bauzon said. He always listened to my questions, answered them fully. I always felt that he was accessible.

Following his 2015 graduation from UC Berkeley, Bauzon did not immediately apply to medical school. He did administrative work for Las Vegas bariatric surgeon Darren Soong, volunteered at the Ruvo Center, and worked as a research assistant with Rochelle Hines, an assistant professor of psychology. She specialized in neurodevelopmental research, and it was especially thanks to her passion, and limitless patience that I was driven to pursue research in medical school. Soong, he said, helped convince him that UNLVs medical school, with a curriculum designed to help the community, would be the best place for him to pursue his medical education.

Bauzons parents his father is a family physician and his mother a neonatal nurse who decided to concentrate on the raising of her children immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in the 70s. Bauzons family moved to Las Vegas from California when he was 10.

Bauzon said his mothers decision to design an at-home after-school curriculum that involved science experiments and regular creative writing exercises has had much to do with his seemingly insatiable appetite for learning.

Learning became fun, he said. I was very fortunate to have a mother who always made it something I looked forward to.

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Med School Student Serves as Lead Author of Alzheimer's Research Article - UNLV NewsCenter

Medical schools seem like they are a dime a dozen. There are so many, but the ones that stand out are the ones most people can name from the Ivy League schools. The trouble is, most people cannot afford an Ivy League medical degree. If you are trying to find a renowned school from which to achieve a medical degree while not going so far into debt, there are six other really good schools worth your consideration.

Along with the easy price tag, the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine based in Sint Maarten gives you the perfect environment to learn and play. When you need a break, you are right in the heart of Caribbean tourist territory. When you have to work, you are making a difference in the lives of native Caribbeans who do not have access to high-quality healthcare.

Many Russian universities of medicine are world-renowned too. One of those, the Russian State Medical University, is well over a hundred years old and offers a variety of specialized medical degrees. The cost of attendance is most agreeable if you can speak Russian and don't mind living there for three years.

This is the leading medical school in Singapore, and one of the most easily identified medical schools in the whole world. The price tag ranks low after several American and British medical schools in an international medical school list. If you love Asian culture and want to get on board with advanced techniques in medicine and research while avoiding heavy six-figure tuition bills, this university may be for you.

A unique college located on the coastline of Grenada, West Indies accepts students from around the globe. A shared arrangement between the U.S. and Great Britain makes it possible to afford an education here. They have an exceptionally high pass rate and post-graduation employment rate too.

King's College London is one of the most premier universities in Great Britain. It has been training physicians for almost two hundred years. Famous doctors, like Lister, the father of modern antisepsis, are synonymous with King's College. Enjoy everything life in London offers along with your medical education at a very affordable price.

Regardless of where you come from, your school fees are very close in cost at this Parisian medical school. They will be elevated slightly for U.S. students this year, but considering how low these fees are already, a slight elevation in fees is really nothing by comparison. This is one of the most prestigious French medical schools in the country and around the globe.

Choosing a medical school that has notoriety is great, but also consider the location. Where would you like to study? Are you ready to pay for room and board at a school in another country? As you consider each of the above options, don't forget to consider housing expenses in your decision.

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6 Medical Schools to Consider in 2021 - University Herald

Medical students have taken a leave of absence in protest of the government's plan to increase admission quotas at medical schools. Meanwhile, fourth-year students who have been boycotting the state licensing exam also said Sunday they will put on hold their collective action.

The Korean Medical Student Association representing some 20,000 students said Monday its junior members, excluding the fourth year, will return to school after putting the issue to a vote.

The government, however, reiterated its earlier stance that it will not allow senior medical students to take the medical licensing exam. Earlier, the government said public opinion is still overwhelmingly negative toward giving an extra chance to students who withdrew their applications.

"Medical students voluntarily refused to take the exam," Sohn Young-rae, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said in a press briefing. "There is no need for an additional exam when test-takers are refusing the exam of their own free will."

As trainee doctors returned to work after weeks of a strike over the government's policy, the medical students' collective action has served as a lingering source of tension between the government and the medical sector over the proposed reform plan.

Doctors and the government have been at odds over whether to give senior medical students another opportunity to take the licensing exam.

Doctors insisted students be allowed to take the test even if they did not register before the deadline, while the government has rejected such a step.

The government's plan to expand the number of medical students by 4,000 over the next 10 years and open a new public medical school sparked tensions within the medical sector.

Thousands of trainee doctors staged a strike for 18 days starting in mid-August over the policy.

A group of doctors and the ruling party agreed in early September to end a nationwide walkout on concerns that the prolonged collective action could disrupt the health care system amid the new coronavirus outbreak.

In response to the deal, the government backed down and promised to suspend the medical reform plan in early September. (Yonhap)

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Medical students to return to school, ending collective action - The Korea Herald

Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Lakehead University researchers receive $330K in immigration research grants

Government research involving the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) and Lakehead University is looking to find ways to bring more immigrants to Northern Ontario to work in primary health care.

The Ontario Human Capital Research and Innovation Fund (OHCRIF) is providing more than $330,000 to Lakehead and NOSM.

The study aims to build a consensus model of community-specific needs, recognizing that primary care in the North often includes emergency department coverage and in-patient care.

The team will investigate how the workforce of Northern Ontario is evolving differently from that of the rest of Ontario, and will examine models of planning for workforce sustainability involving different demographics and different conditions of health-care demand, said a news release from Lakehead.

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The funding includes $250,000 from OHCRIF going to researchers Dr. Erin Cameron, Dr. Diana Uranijik, Dr. Brianne Wood and John Hogenbirk.

Their study, Working models for human capital planning in Northern Ontario: a model for the primary healthcare workforce, will focus on human capital planning in Northern Ontarios primary care sector, said the release.

It is an ambitious project, but study findings could help inform provincial agencies, workforce planning boards, communities, employers such as hospitals, primary-care providers, health-care education institutions, Ontario Health Teams, and others to better plan for and respond to community and employer needs within a primary health-care setting," said Cameron, an assistant professor at NOSM.

Additional funding of $83,093 has been granted to a team of Lakehead researchers led by Dr. Kathy Sanderson for research that examines how community and organizational welcoming affects the retention and recruitment of new immigrants.

Sanderson and her team from the Faculty of Business are looking for local employers and community leaders to get involved and share their experience in this area. To find out how to participate, visit welcomeNWO.ca.

Both projects are funded in part by the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario.

Sudbury.com

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Northern medical school on the newcomers recruiting trail - Northern Ontario Business

As home to the largest medical school in the country, as well as leading voices in medical research and clinical care, Indiana University didn't have to look far for expert guidance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the request of IU President Michael A. McRobbie, the university formed its Medical Response Team for COVID-19 over the summer to plan and implement ongoing health and safety strategies to protect students, faculty and staff and to help campus leadership make decisions informed by expert analysis and knowledge of clinical care and public health.

With the fall semester now in full swing, the team meets daily and regularly reviews data and reports on a multitude of factors -- including testing results, contact tracing efficiency and response, outbreak mitigation efforts, and logistical concerns -- that help IU take swift action to limit the spread of COVID-19 among students, faculty and staff.

"All decisions are viewed through the lens of a composite of metrics that attempt to understand the internal burden of disease, the external burden in the surrounding communities, how effective we are at controlling the virus locally and the availability of resources to keep the IU community safe," said Dr. Cole Beeler, an IU School of Medicine faculty member and one of three physician leaders of the IU Medical Response Team. "We are working every day to make sure IU can continue to provide the education and research services that our students and state rely on us for as safely as possible."

The overall work of the Medical Response Team is divided into three areas: symptomatic testing, contact tracing and mitigation testing. Each area has its own leader and core team members responsible for coordinating COVID-19 prevention and mitigation efforts across all campuses.

Beeler is the director of symptomatic testing for the IU Medical Response Team. He is also an assistant professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the IU School of Medicine and medical director of infection prevention at IU Health University Hospital in Indianapolis, where he cares for patients and has a clinic.

Beeler, who grew up in Indiana, completed his college, medical school, residency and fellowship training at IU.

Dr. Adrian Gardner is the director of contact tracing for the IU Medical Response Team. He is also associate dean for global health at the IU School of Medicine, as well as director of the IU Center for Global Health and executive director of the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare Consortium of North American academic health centers.

Gardner earned his medical degree from Brown University, completed a fellowship in infectious diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

He joined IU in 2012 as the executive field director of the AMPATH Consortium and was based full time in Eldoret, Kenya, for seven years. During his time in this role, Gardner worked closely with Kenyan program leadership to make strategic investments and policy decisions to improve community health, provide the best care for patients and control infectious diseases such as HIV.

Dr. Aaron Carroll is director of mitigation testing for the Medical Response Team. He is also a Regenstrief Foundation Professor I, associate dean for research mentoring, a Bicentennial Professor and professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. Carroll is a health-related research writer for The New York Times and blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist.

Carroll completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, a residency at the University of Washington and a fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program.

These physicians, along with those on their core teams and IU leaders, review data and the current status of symptomatic testing, contact tracing and mitigation testing multiple times a week to ensure the university is operating in a way that keeps its students, faculty and staff as safe as possible.

"There's never one thing we're focused on; it's always a number of metrics and data sets," Beeler said. "With a pandemic and a complex population like IU, one number or metric could never tell us the whole story. It's reviewing all the pieces we've put in place to manage the pandemic and seeing how each is performing individually but also how they're working together. It's this full picture with all of these moving parts that we use to determine if a change would need to be made for the health and safety of the university community."

IU maintains a COVID-19 dashboard that includes data, reviewed by the Medical Response Team, on mitigation testing and symptomatic testing. It's this data, along with the Medical Response Team's analysis, that allows IU to evaluate health and safety and adjust the university's strategy in order to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

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Meet the top doctors leading IU's COVID-19 health, safety efforts - IU Newsroom

500 jobs? Filling a nearly empty building? Jobs that pay an average of $75,000? A new journalism venture coming to town?

Ha! Got you.

Nope, Fort Worth and Texas officials are more than a little gleeful as they seem on the verge of filling the former FAA headquarters with another aviation-related company with the hope of bringing more than 500 corporate jobs. The city seemed at least to have the pretense of going through the motions of setting things up for the company to make the move. The news release from Gov. Greg Abbotts office made it sound like all 500 employees were already here and ordering another round of margaritas at Joe Ts.

Not quite yet, but still, its good news for a year where the business world is all about survival, not expansion and growth. This is a good sign.

Aviation-related company eyes Fort Worth for key expansion

Speaking of survival, the very popular Preserve the Fort grant campaign is up and running again.

Almost $9 million is available to businesses through these grants, which are funded by part of the City of Fort Worths CARES Act allocation, the city said in a news release.

Thanks to the success of the first round of Preserve the Fort grants earlier this summer, the citys Economic Development Department and United Way of Tarrant County have expanded the grant criteria to include slightly larger businesses with up to 500 employees, in addition to smaller for-profit businesses and self-employed individuals/independent contractors. It could be a life saver.

Fort Worth launches 2nd round of Preserve the Fort small business grant program

It was also a good day for the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

The late Anne Marion and the Burnett Foundation have made a $25 million gift to establish The Anne W. Marion Endowment in support of the operations of the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine in perpetuity.

This transformational gift will provide funds to support students, faculty and programming for the medical school, the school said in a news release.

$25 million gift for TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine

Wednesday is National Guacamole Day and the Dallas Cowboys are actually playing football, which seemed so unlikely just a few months back. So what better time to celebrate both. Go for it on fourth down!

Yo Quiero! Brands, a North Texas-based company, earlier this summer announced a brand partnership with the Dallas Cowboys. So, no surprise there are some products with the Cowboy star that are ready to party with you.

Here are a couple of avocado jokes for the day:

A senior citizen comes to his weekly card game with a young guy wearing skinny jeans, wearing a beret and eating avocado toast.

His friends say:Who is this guy?

The senior citizen says: This is my hip replacement.

Whats an avocados favorite arcade game?

Guac-a-mole

Its National Guacamole Day! Heres one way to celebrate with Americas team

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What to Know: Jobs coming to town and Preserve the Fort, Part deux - fortworthbusiness.com