On a crisp, sunny February afternoon in Kris Saha’s lab in Madison, doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering Nicole Piscopo put a petri dish of cells underneath a high-powered microscope. The cells, which were gene-edited to include a gene from sea anemones, were glowing red.
Among Indian companies, Bharat Biotech Ltd is reportedly partnering with University of Wisconsin-Madison and US-based FluGen to develop a vaccine while Zydus Cadila and Serum Institute, too, are working for a vaccine
Research provides information on social distancing, transmission of virus.
The map created by the GeoDS Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tracks the movement of Americans, using anonymous location data from cell phones.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is using a tool to estimate just how much people have cut back on travel, which is data that can be used to inform the response to the virus.
“We still need to understand how the virus behaves in different species, and which questions are best answered by which species,” said Dave O’Connor, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is leading some of the first research in the US on Covid-19 in monkeys. Here are a few playing a primary role in current research.
Dave O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is studying SARS-CoV-2 in cynomolgus monkeys, says the field will ultimately winnow down models. “It might turn out that some models are not really worth pursuing after we do this sort of foundational work, but I just don’t think we’re there yet. We need to let the data guide us.”
“Bharat Biotech had approached us for preclinical studies but we did not have the animals,” says Pothani. Now these are being carried out in University of Wisconsin-Madison. The same is true for the vaccine developed by Serum Institute of India and Codagenix, Inc. is also being tested in the USA. Pothani reveals that the institute has requested the secretary to import the animals to ensure future studies.
If things go according to plan, human trials could start by August.
In conservation circles, a litmus test for decisions often is expressed in a question: What would Aldo do (WWAD)?
Aldo is of course Aldo Leopold, the late, great University of Wisconsin professor, pioneer of wildlife management and supreme observer of nature and humankind.
On the case is the somewhat facetiously named Unionid Mussel Strike Force, a collaboration of two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a half-dozen other scientists from a handful of federal agencies around the country. But in addition to trying to solve a mystery, the Strike Force is struggling against another obstacle long familiar to mussel specialists: apathy.
Goldwater scholarships recognize excellence in undergraduate research.
Noted: Plasma trials have received FDA approval and are already moving forward at medical centers including those affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and University of Wisconsin-Madison. The FDA has also approved the use of survivor plasma to treat patients on an experimental, compassionate basis.
The effort is in collaboration with the United Auto Workers union, the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association. The company said it’s using an open-source design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the project.
Q When did you start work on a new vaccine and what is the status of the research?
A. We began work on the new vaccine, CoroFlu, in February this year. CoroFlu builds on cutting-edge technology from an influenza vaccine already being developed by US company FluGen, and based on research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (UWM). Because CoroFlu is based on a flu vaccine, our team hopes to protect patients from both the flu virus and the novel coronavirus at the same time.
Some of the most serious and critically ill will be offered the chance to be treated with the blood of those who have recovered from the virus.
UW research lab works to modify chicken coronavirus vaccine to create DNA based vaccine for human coronavirus.
Researchers with the University of Wisconsin – Madison are teaming with Madison-based company FluGen and Hyderabad, India-based Bharat Biotech.
An effort led by the others in the DES team, including former KIPAC students Alex Drlica-Wagner, a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab and an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Keith Bechtol, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and their collaborators produced the crucial final step: a model of which satellite galaxies are most likely to be seen by current surveys, given where they are in the sky as well as their brightness, size, and distance.
In India, Hyderabad-based vaccine manufacturer, Bharat Biotech, which has been working on developing a intra-nasal drop vaccine for COVID-19, has initiated testing in the US in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine developer FluGen, CNBC-TV18 reported.
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.
