Illinois Medicine

LLINOIS MEDICINE HAS DOZENS OF RESEARCH AND CLINICAL PROJECTS UNDERWAY related to COVID-19, well beyond the multiple grants to test vaccines and treatments awarded to Richard Novak, MD, and Jerry Krishnan, MD, PhD, along with various co-investigators (see "Facing Down COVID-19," page 11). All told, College of Medicine researchers have obtained 83 grants and contracts that potentially totaled more than $60 million during the past several months (amounts fluctuated based on study enrollments and other factors). Most of them have gone to faculty in Chicago, although nearly a dozen have been awarded to investigators on the Peoria campus of the COM. They span 16 medical disciplines, with medicine, pediatrics, emergency medicine, and microbiology and immunology the most commonly represented. Funders include government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Illinois Department of Public Health; partner higher- educational institutions like Northwestern and Rush universities; nonprofit organizations like BEI Resources and the Community Foundation of Central Illinois; and private for-profit entities like Tyco Healthcare Group and Blade Therapeutics. "We geared up to do very large amounts of new and innovative work related to COVID-19—the entire spectrum of activity," says Bellur S. Prabhakar, MSc, PhD, interim senior associate dean for research and professor of microbiology and immunology, who was named UIC's campuswide Inventor of the Year in February 2020. "UIC has come through in these extraordinarily challenging conditions. Many people saw this as an opportunity to contribute, and they did." Aside from the work of Novak and Krishnan, eight projects have received more than $500,000 each in grants or contracts: • About $7.4 million for a contract examining the impacts of the pandemic on the lives of adolescents from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Benjamin Van Voorhees, MD, MPH, of Pediatrics is principal investigator and nine others are co-investigators for this contract, which is looking at how factors such as school closings, stay-at-home orders, social isolation, adult unemployment, decreased social supports and other factors are affecting mental health issues like anxiety and depression. The project will supplement the PATH 2 Purpose: Primary Care and Community-Based Prevention of Mental Disorders in Adolescents (P2P) study, a broader mental health campaign that teaches teens to preventatively manage stress with an array of digital media, toolkits, blog posts and even comic books. • More than $3.4 million for a clinical trial focused on COVID-19 ACTIV Integration of Host-Targeting Therapies, from the University of Pittsburgh. With Janet Lin, MD, MPH, MBA, of Emergency Medicine as principal investigator and John Quigley, MD, as co-investigator, this outpatient multicenter trial will test antithrombotics in 7,000 outpatients nationally, investigating medications that may have an impact on preventing the longer-term effects of COVID-19. Blood clots are one of the disease's leading complications, creating risks of stroke, pulmonary embolism, heart attacks and organ damage. The goal is to see if anticoagulants or other antithrombotics will reduce cardiovascular or pulmonary complications in newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients, specifically looking at the safety and effectiveness of aspirin and apixaban on those who do not require hospitalization. • More than $1.4 million for a Chicago Department of Public Health contract to perform COVID-19 testing for people experiencing homelessness during a pandemic. Led by Stockton Mayer, DO, with four co-investigators, this program is aimed to shield those at high risk from catching COVID-19 at homeless shelters by testing at locations that have outbreaks in a "strike team model," Mayer says. In collaboration with the UIC College of Nursing, they've conducted more than 40,000 tests on nearly 6,000 people, some of them at long-term care facilities, jails and other locations, and there has been only one COVID-19 death at a homeless shelter where the testing has taken place. • Nearly $1.3 million for a contract with the Illinois Department of Public Health related to SARS-CoV-2 response, led by Susan Bleasdale, MD, with six co-investigators from the infectious diseases division in the department of medicine. The team has been providing infectious disease and infection prevention expertise and guidance, reviewing measures for opening activities across the state safely and evaluating data to provide insight into mitigation strategies for prevention of COVID-19 transmission. They have provided both testing strategies as capacity has increased and support in outbreak investigations, especially at the onset of the pandemic, when skilled nursing facilities and departments of corrections were the hardest hit by the virus. • More than $1 million for a clinical trial, sponsored by PhysIQ, delving into whether a personalized analytics wearable biosensor platform called DeCODe helps with early detection of COVID-19 decompensation. Led by Terry Vanden Hoek, MD, of the department of emergency medicine, with David Chestek, DO, and Heather Prendergast, MD, MPH, as co-investigators, the trial is looking at whether these easy-to-wear patches can provide streamed physiologic digital data built on an end-to-end cloud platform to provide ongoing assessments and address barriers to care, especially among underserved populations. • About $937,000 for a contract with Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. to search for a therapy for COVID-19. Led by Prabhakar, of the department of microbiology and immunology, the COM researchers completed the screening of more than 18,000 compounds, including 3,000 phase 1 FDA-approved compounds, in a high-throughput assay. They retested those that yielded positive results in a virus entry inhibition assay, which has identified 32 compounds that can inhibit the virus' entry into the cell. Those compounds were then being tested against live virus to determine their antiviral effect. In December, Prabhakar was in negotiations with Vanda for another $1 million contract to continue testing in preclinical animal models, and he felt optimistic that the follow- on contract would come through. • An additional $960,000 for a contract from the Illinois Department of Public Health for the preparation of a transport medium for nasal swabs used in testing so they could be sent in a safe and sterile fashion. A COM team led by Prabhakar produced over 320,000 vials of this transport medium, tiding over the IDPH for nearly three months until the department could find a commercial source for manufacturing them. • A $900,000 grant from the CDC for a project looking at the prevention of healthcare-associated infections, also led by Bleasdale, with five co- investigators. The multidisciplinary team of infectious disease physicians and pharmacists, partnering with occupational hygienists in the UIC School of Public Health, is evaluating two aspects of COVID-19. One project is examining prevalence of the disease in healthcare workers, the risk factors associated with getting it, and the antibody response and persistence afterward. The group also seeks to understand the behavior of COVID-19 in the hospital environment, as well as the risk of transmission and best tools for protection of healthcare workers. This will encompass evaluating respiratory treatments and performing air sampling in the patient environment and on healthcare workers. COM Obtains Dozens of COVID-19 Grants, Contracts Exceeding $60M B Y E D F I N K E L I Illinois Medicine | 17

• Cover