UW Health has an automated instrument capable of processing about 1,200 COVID-19 tests a day, or roughly four times the number that its lab now typically does.
The instrument has yet to be used for a single COVID-19 test.
UW Health’s lab, like others throughout the state, has been unable to get the chemicals, or reagents, needed to process specimens on the instrument.
Quoted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison joined the project last weekend and is expected to host one of the clinical trials.
The work in Madison will be led by William Hartman, UW Health assistant professor of anesthesiology. Hartman said Madison will be one of the clinical trial sites, though he could not say how many patients will participate.
“I think we can be very hopeful in that it has exhibited success with previous coronaviruses including SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome),” Hartman said, referring to the use of survivor plasma.
Features UW–Madison spokesman Eric Hamilton.
Two UW-Madison researchers are working with a pair of bio-tech companies to develop a possible vaccine for the coronavirus.
Virologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have partnered with vaccine companies FluGen and Bharat Biotech to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus, according to a news release from the university.
UW-Madison researchers and the vaccine companies FluGen and Bharat Biotech are developing and testing a vaccine against COVID-19 called CoroFlu, they announced Thursday.
The mapping team initially used data from a crowd-sourced tracker of county-level cases and validated them with estimates from state health departments. The researchers have since incorporated data from several other sources, and they are partnering with their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to authenticate that information.
Autumn, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has dyed-blond bangs and traces of a Carolina twang. I knew her name from a widely circulated interview she gave a few years ago on being a trans woman in mathematics. Yair, of Yale University, is a recent empty nester with a graying beard and a gentle bearing.
“The detector is operating and transmitting data north as usual,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and spokesperson for IceCube.
UW Hospital has joined the National COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project, which plans to study the use of antibodies from people who have recovered from the viral respiratory disease to treat patients newly infected with it.
Researchers and community organizations responding to the COVID-19 pandemic will be receiving funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, according to a release on Tuesday morning.
What began two weeks ago with a pair of scientists urging the use of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to rescue the sick has blown up into a national movement.
According to a statement from Gov. Tony Evers’ office, Fitchburg-based Promega, Madison-based Exact Sciences and UW Health, and Marshfield-based Marshfield Health Clinic System will work with the laboratory network to share knowledge, resources and technology to boost the state’s ability to test patients for the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19.
Quoted: “This is a tale of two proteins, one viral, the other human, getting close and familiar and interacting more strongly,” said Michael Sussman, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Early last week, Lennon Rodgers, director of the Engineering Design Innovation Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an urgent email from the university’s hospital. Could his lab make 1,000 face shields to protect staff testing and treating Covid-19 patients? The hospital’s usual suppliers were out of stock, due to the spike in demand prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The 60 to 70 researchers who would normally be in the AIDS Vaccine Research Lab (AVRL) at UW are now down to five or six in person, with the others working at home.
Total of 26,505 respondents from Wisconsin completed survey.
Researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard Medical School scanned Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s brain four times over 14 years—in 2002 when he was 27 years old; 2005 when he was 30; 2007 when he was 32; and 2016 when he was 41.
But polls of Wisconsin voters taken in late February by the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Marquette University Law School showed overwhelming support for Sanders from young voters.
Lack of physical distancing leads to push for social media campaign.
Community college transfer programs face challenges both at their home institutions and at the institutions to which students want to transfer. Add STEM to the equation and the challenges grow. Xueli Wang, a professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, explores those challenges and the way students meet them in On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Education Press). The book follows 1,670 community college students for four years as they transfer to four-year institutions.
Scout, a golden retriever who was the family pet of WeatherTech CEO and founder David MacNeil, has died.
The world learned about Scout’s triumph over cancer thanks to the help of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine during the Super Bowl. On Sunday, Scout “crossed the rainbow bridge,” according to an Instagram post on a feed dedicated to his exploits.
Quoted: A 2015 study of influenza and credit card and mortgage defaults in 83 metro areas found the largest effects were for 90-day defaults, suggesting a flu outbreak has a “disproportionate impact on vulnerable borrowers who are already behind on their payments.”
“And that’s just a regular flu, not a pandemic where you actually are having people sent home before they’re sick,” said J. Michael Collins, one of the study’s authors and professor and director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A recently pubished 18-year analysis of the mind of a Buddhist monk by the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found daily, intensive meditation slowed the monk’s brain aging by as much as eight years when compared to a control group.
Noted: One in five Wisconsin workers holds “a poverty wage job with few benefits,” according to a 2018 report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Social distancing would be a lot less inequality promoting if we had the infrastructure of strong medical care, insurance and housing supports for low-wage workers, but we don’t,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and the associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. “That means that this crisis tends to push the inequality along, instead of the crisis showing how connected we are and pulling us closer together.”
In his UW-Madison lab, Adel Talaat developed an experimental vaccine to protect chickens from coronavirus. When the pandemic of a different strain arose in people late last year, Talaat used his technique to create a vaccine candidate for humans.
Trump’s path into politics was based on questioning the legitimacy of government and “the need to prepare for disaster by maintaining a closed society protected from infected outsiders,” University of Wisconsin researchers Thomas Salek and Andrew Cole concluded in a 2018 study of Trump’s use of the Ebola crisis. They said that Trump’s “apocalyptic rhetoric sketched some of the foundational features of his ‘Make America Great Again’ ” platform in the 2016 campaign.
Before the 2016 election, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and researcher Young Mie Kim analyzed millions of political ads, leading her to find evidence of Kremlin-linked groups placing divisive political ads on social media in order to further divide Americans and keep them home during elections. Kim has found anecdotal evidence of similar political ads ahead of the 2020 election.
Near the beginning and end of each ice season, Hopkins checks high-resolution webcams perched atop UW-Madison’s 15-story Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences building at 1225 W. Dayton St., although he complains that new buildings have obscured much of the view.
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a research library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, regularly publishes statistics about the state of diversity in Children’s Books.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have identified a new way that common Aspergillus molds can induce asthma, by first attacking the protective tissue barrier deep in the lungs.
Like a tokamak, a stellarator—such as the one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shown above—is a donut-shaped (toroidal) plasma stream that generates power by fusing light particles into heavier ones. These generators must be brought up to temperatures like those of the sun and other, well, naturally occurring fusion plasma generators.
Dave O’Connor, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is working with colleagues to test the usefulness of monkeys in the study of coronavirus treatments. He said that a Chinese group had already published some data on rhesus macaques and he had heard that more results from other labs around the world would be coming soon.
In 2016, Charles Raison, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, published an intriguing study of 30 patients with clinical depression. Half of them rested on a bed while an infrared heat-lamp array raised their body temperature to 101.3 degrees.
With hundreds of coronavirus test specimens now coming in daily to UW-Madison’s Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, the lab stayed open over the weekend and has more than tripled its capacity.
The new study, led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is among the first to look at how people with the syndrome fare later in life. (The researchers declined to comment.)
The all-out effort to contain COVID-19 or minimize its consequences is something that hasn’t been seen since the “Spanish” flu pandemic in 1918-19, which killed an estimated 50 million people, including 675,000 in the U.S., said Richard Keller, a UW-Madison professor of the history of medicine.
Letter to the editor: Dogs and cats are not laboratory equipment, they are living, breathing and feeling members of our families.
The hidden long-range order of this putative state could rival the more obvious orderliness of a crystal. “That observation right there was at the heart of why people thought there should be an ideal glass,” said Mark Ediger, a chemical physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Independent researchers continue to identify social media accounts with Russian links. Race was among the top issues that such accounts tried to foster division over, said Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies political communication online. Others included nationalism, immigration, gun control and gay rights.
$6.4 million USDA grant with matching funds, innovative genetic research, aid farmers in creating better quality products.
But no animal model is perfect. “There’s going to be a need not just for one animal model, but multiple,” says David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Monkeys and mice tell researchers different things about infection, shedding light on factors such as the role of the immune system or how the virus spreads. “We can try to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible and integrate that with the emerging volume of data from the clinic,” says O’Connor.
A $10 million, five-year effort at UW-Madison to curb obesity in Wisconsin, which ended in December, met a stark reality: The state’s obesity rate, which is slightly higher than the national average, continued to go up.
Noted: This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with scientists Dave O’Connor and Tom Friedrich, who research viral infections at the University of Wisconsin. O’Connor and Friedrich formed a Slack channel on Jan. 22 to coordinate coronavirus research with scientists worldwide.
Quoted: A cache of Instagram posts captured by researchers showed that the Russians were “better at impersonating candidates” and that influence-mongers “have moved away from creating their own fake advocacy groups to mimicking and appropriating the names of actual American groups,” wrote Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin professor who analyzed the material with her team.
The report from professor Young Mie Kim found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election.
The report from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election.
Increasingly, radium in public water supplies has become a notable element for other municipalities in suburban Milwaukee — and much of the state, new research from a Wisconsin study has found.
One ironic twist is that the levels in Waukesha, a community which was forced to find a solution to meet federally mandated radium limits, may have actually improved, albeit marginally, in recent years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison study suggests.
To explore this possibility, my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Elections Research Center and I presented Democratic primary voters with a longer menu of reasons for their choice of candidates. In statewide surveys of 3,600 adults across the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we asked respondents whether they planned to vote in their states’ primaries.
For UW-Madison professors Thomas Friedrich and David O’Connor, some of the biggest questions are how the virus made its way to humans in the first place, why it causes more severe illness than some other coronaviruses and how long it persists in the body.
Wisconsin is now conducting its own tests for the new coronavirus, but the state has yet to see its second case. As of Monday, 18 people in the state have tested negative and test results for two people remain pending.
The testing will be done at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and at the Milwaukee Health Department, health officials said. Test samples previously were sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The testing will be done at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and at the Milwaukee Health Department, health officials said.
Researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and others analyzed groundwater data collected by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from 2000 to 2018. They found radium levels were trending upward in wells drawing from a regional aquifer underlying the southern two-thirds of the state. The findings were published in a American Water Works Association journal.
Chancellor Rebecca Blank named Steve Ackerman the next vice chancellor for research and graduate education, one of a handful of high-profile positions that report directly to Blank. The job entails overseeing $1.2 billion in annual research spending and thousands of graduate students.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created LRRK2 mutants in both embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells (ESCs and iPSCs, respectively). They allowed these cells to grow into mature neurons, to compare the growth characteristics of all cells.
As debate rages on about just how far is too far, UW balances research, public opinion, policy.
“We know now how to insert a single mutation, a point mutation, into the marmoset stem cell,” says Marina Emborg, professor of medical physics and leader of University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists who conducted the study. “This is an exquisite model of Parkinson’s. For testing therapies, this is the perfect platform.”
There’s also injury from electrocution when there are code violations,” said Dr. Geoffrey Swain, a retired family physician who worked on the research report funded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the Joseph and Vera Zilber Charitable Foundation.
Stephanie Diem, an associate professor in the department of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has worked on nuclear fusion for more than two decades since she came to the UW as a freshman.
At UW-Madison, scientists are working to build non-human primate models to test medical countermeasures such as vaccines and therapeutics. David O’Connor from the School of Medicine and Public Health and Thomas Friedrich from the School of Veterinary Medicine are a big part of that team, which is hoping to work with others around the world.
