How researchers are making do in the time of Covid

One of the astonishing aspects of the human response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been how quickly scientists pivoted to studying every facet of the virus in order to mitigate the loss of life and plan for a return to normalcy. At the same time, a lot of non-coronavirus research ground to a near halt.

With research labs and offices shuttered for all but essential workers, many scientists were stuck at home, their fieldwork and meetings canceled and planned experiments kicked down the road as they struggled to figure out how to keep their research programs going. Many took the opportunity to catch up on writing grants and papers; some—in between caring for kids—came up with strategic workarounds to keep the scientific juices flowing.

To gauge how researchers in different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke with an array of scientists and technical staff—among thema specialist keeping alive genetically important strains of fruit flies, the maintenance chief of an astronomical observatory working to keep telescopes safe and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease. Here are a few slices of scientific life during the pandemic.

Agnieszka Czechowicz, Stanford University School of Medicine

Pediatrician Agnieszka Czechowicz, Stanford University[/ars_img]Czechowicz is a pediatrician in Stanford’s division of stem cell transplantation and regenerative medicine, where she manages a research group that develops new therapies and conducts clinical trials on rare genetic diseases.

Agnieszka Czechowicz’s father suffers from severe Parkinson’s disease. The coronavirus pandemic forced him to remain indoors and away from people, robbing him of the physical conditioning and social interactions he needs to cope with his disease. A recent fall left him in the hospital, bringing the additional worry that he might contract Covid-19 there and isolating him further.>>For Czechowicz, his situation brought into sharp relief the challenges the coronavirus has forced upon those carrying out clinical trials, including those she is running, which involve patients traveling to hospitals around the country. “Would I have him travel to any clinical site right now for a new Parkinson’s treatment?” she says. “Absolutely not.”

The pandemic forced Czechowicz to halt clinical trials she oversees for a rare genetic disease of children called Fanconi anemia, a condition that impairs the body’s ability to repair damaged DNA and often leads to bone marrow failure and cancer. The treatment Czechowicz and colleagues are testing involves extracting blood-forming stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, inserting a healthy copy of a missing or malfunctioning gene and then reinfusing those cells back into the patient.

“Every aspect of what I do is massively impacted by the pandemic,” Czechowicz says. One of her early-stage clinical trials involves testing the safety of the therapy. But during the initial shutdown—which started in mid-March and lasted for two months—her patients could not readily travel to Stanford for the necessary follow-up visits, and remote monitoring was difficult.

“There’s special blood testing and bone marrow testing that we need to do. In particular, it’s critical to get the samples to make sure the patients, for example, aren’t developing leukemia,” she says. “There’s no way to know that without really checking the bone marrow.” She had to clear large hurdles to get her patients evaluated.

Another early-stage trial, designed to determine the effectiveness of the therapy, also had to stop enrolling new patients. Because speed is important when it comes to treating Fanconi anemia—the children are likely losing stem cells all the time—any delay in treatment can be a source of great anxiety for their parents. Czechowicz had to explain to them why the trials were temporarily halted. “It was really challenging to have these discussions with the families,” she says.

With the easing of travel and workplace restrictions, the families began traveling to Stanford in June—but with infections back on the rise, many families are becoming hesitant again, says Czechowicz. Fortunately, her trials are small, so she can guide each family through the process of safely resuming the trials and continuing with follow-up. Her own team also has to follow strict safety protocols. For example, even though her lab has 10 members, only two can be in the lab at any one time, and only one parent is allowed into the clinic with the child.

Not all clinical trials can pay such close attention to individual patients. Large trials with hundreds of patients can involve multiple sites and require much more monitoring, so resuming those remains difficult. Also, restrictions on working full bore are slowing the pipeline for new therapies. “The impact of that, we’re not going to see for many years to come,” Czechowicz says.

Abolhassan Jawahery, University of Maryland, College Park

Jawahery is a particle physicist and a member of LHCb, one of the main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

In December 2018, well before the coronavirus pandemic began, the LHC shut down for upgrades. Housed in a 27-kilometer-long tunnel about 100 meters underground, the LHC accelerates two beams of protons, one clockwise and one counterclockwise, and makes them collide head-on at four locations. There, four gigantic subterranean detectors—ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE—sift through the debris of particles created by the collisions, looking for evidence of new physics. (For example, ATLAS and CMS found the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle of the Higgs field, which gives all elementary particles their mass.)>>For its next set of experiments, which aim to probe the properties of subatomic particles with greater precision, the LHC needed to increase the intensity of its proton beams. Consequently, the four detectors needed to be upgraded too, to handle the resultant higher temperatures and increased radiation at the sites of the particle collisions. The work was on track for a restart around May 2021 until the pandemic swept all the scientists’ careful plans away.

The LHC and its four detectors are each run by a separate collaboration. CERN, which manages the LHC, is hopeful it can restart the collider by February 2022. “They think that they can get the accelerator going if there are no more major catastrophic events,” says physicist Abolhassan Jawahery. But the impact on the four detectors is less clear.

For the LHCb upgrade, Jawahery’s team at the University of Maryland had been working on building about 4,000 extremely sensitive electronic circuit boards. These boards have to be “burned in” before they can be sent to CERN. “We put them in an oven, literally cooking the boards and then running extensive tests in order to get them ready so that we can put them in the accelerator and run them for 10 to 20 years,” says Jawahery. “And none of that could be done during the pandemic shutdown.”

The team resumed its work in June, but with restrictions put in place by the state of Maryland. Jawahery runs two labs, and for months was allowed only two people at a time in one lab and three in the other, making progress extremely slow. Still, his team is fortunate that it does not depend on supplies from countries hit hard by the coronavirus. Other labs weren’t so lucky. Scientists in Milan, for example, built some electronics and detector components for the LHCb, and a lab at Syracuse University in New York built sensors that relied on shipments from Milan. When Milan was completely closed down at the height of the pandemic, Syracuse, too, stopped working on Milan-dependent components.

For Jawahery the lockdown had a silver lining. The LHC’s most recent run had produced about 25 gigabytes of data per second—but his team had found little time to analyze any of it before the pandemic. “We were complaining that we were spending all our time building the new instrument and the data keeps on coming,” he says. When he and his team were locked out of their labs, they turned to their data backlog. “We could do actual physics,” he says. “We are already getting ready to publish some papers.”