Nancy Dreyer:
Hi everybody, my name is Nancy Dreyer. I'm a Brandeis alumna, Class of 1972, and I'm proud to be a trustee of Brandeis University. For my work, I serve as Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President at IQVIA Real World Solutions. IQVIA is a public company, a global provider of analytics, technology and solutions and research services that help medical providers, pharmaceutical companies and biotech and clinical trial investigators to accelerate product development and improve healthcare.
Nancy Dreyer:
I'm also a card-carrying epidemiologist and actively involved in COVID research, focusing on trying to find prescription and nonprescription meds or vitamins or minerals, or some combination that makes you feel better, faster or not get so sick. I focus on the outpatient environment today. I'm very appreciative of all your interest in Brandeis first and foremost and in this discussion about COVID. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the scientific briefing and discussion with our esteemed faculty.
Nancy Dreyer:
Few people realize how extraordinary Brandeis is in the natural sciences. An institution with the size, structure and mission of a liberal arts college, but a research appropriate profile that put's it in the company of the country's most prominent institutions. Our active division of science faculty includes a MacArthur genius fellow, three investigators with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ten National Academies Fellows, and now a Nobel Prize winner, Professor Michael Rosbash, we're delighted to welcome to our panel today.
Nancy Dreyer:
Brandeis is by far the smallest of 19 universities currently supporting a materials research science and engineering center that builds on Brandeis' distinctive strength and research at the intersection of physics, biology and chemistry. The Brandeis MRSEC or MRSEC just received six more years of funding from the National Science Foundation. It's an incredibly competitive process, and remarkable considering we're the only MRSEC in the country, hosted outside of an engineering school. We'll have the opportunity to learn more about this dynamic center in the groundbreaking scientific discoveries and research happenings at Brandeis today.
Nancy Dreyer:
Now, I don't know about you, but I find this incredibly impressive, and extraordinarily, how a small place like Brandeis, and such a special one like that can keep this kind of company, and in fact, leave others in the dust. Did you know that the Brandeis division of science attracted over 36 million in external research funding in FY 2019? More FTE than almost any other university in the country? Can you imagine having two noble prize winners on our faculty?
Nancy Dreyer:
Our goal for this briefing is to offer a deeper dive into the latest diagnostic vaccine and therapeutic research initiatives at Brandeis and beyond. The format for today's briefing from our faculty will include a description of their latest research projects related to the COVID-19 challenge, followed by an interactive Q&A. So during the question and answer session, your microphones will be unmuted and video will be enabled if it isn't already. We'll rely on you to use the raise the hand feature, so we can cue up the order of the questions. And if you have any trouble with that, use your video to wave your hand.
Nancy Dreyer:
Because I know sometimes, despite the best of intentions, that raise hand function doesn't always work. But we are looking for a lively and enlightening exchange today. So now it's my pleasure to introduce our Brandeis faculty panelists, who are leading the way in biomedical and biophysical research to help fight this pandemic. We have Micheal Rosbash, who's the Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in neuroscience, Professor of biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. We have Tijana Ivanovic, an assistant professor of biochemistry doing some very interesting research.
Nancy Dreyer:
Seth Fraden, a professor of physics at the Martin A. Fisher School of Physics and Director of the Brandeis Bioinspired Soft Materials Research Center, also PhD'87. And Michael Hagan, a professor of physics at the Martin A. Fisher School of Physics. Welcome, and thank you for participating in this. I'd like to also take a moment to welcome our president, Ron Liebowitz, who's going to be joining us today as a discussion. Let's begin with Michael Rosbash. Michael, can I turn it over to you?
Michael Rosbash:
You may. Let me see if I can share my screen here successfully. There we go. Let's see if that works. How's that?
Nancy Dreyer:
It's good.
Michael Rosbash:
Everybody can see here?
Nancy Dreyer:
Yeah.
Michael Rosbash:
Okay.
Michael Rosbash:
Thanks so all very much, fun to be here. We're on vacation in Maine, so I'm staring out at the ocean, actually staring Southwest right toward Brandeis. I'm going to give you two stories, one for about eight minutes or which is this group that I belong to for the past four months, called Scientists to Stop COVID-19, I'll tell you a little about this effort, which is largely an effort in policy and attempts to influence the government. And then I'll tell you for the last minute and half or two minutes about some research going on in my lab to address this problem in what I hope is the unique way.
Michael Rosbash:
So, this group got together about four months ago to try and grapple with the scientific and to a large extent the policy issues that confronted the country and the scientific community. And ... Why am I stuck? There we go, I see what to do.
Michael Rosbash:
Okay, so we were about 13 people who signed this initial document, and they're listed here. And some of whom you may know, depending on your background, some of whom you don't. Jonathan Simons is the president of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, President and CEO. Ed Scolnick was the president of research at Merck for more than 20 years and developed some of the most famous vaccines in the Western world in the 20th century.
Michael Rosbash:
Stu Schreiber is the founder of Vertex, a professor of chemistry at Harvard and the Berlin Institute, et cetera. A really illustrious and very diverse group of people. We got some notoriety, I should say, when this Wall Street Journal article came out about a month after we started to get together and as the title indicates, we were put in touch with the White House, with members of Congress by a group of wealthy people who were acquainted with some of our members through their venture-capital efforts. These people paved the way or facilitated our contact with the White House and with the FDA.
Michael Rosbash:
Our goal was to as the title indicates, how to defeat or impact the epidemic, the pandemic that was sweeping the world. And as you can see from the slide, we really divided our task into four phases or waves. Repurposing drugs in the second wave turning antibodies and therapeutics, the third wave is vaccines, which we are deep in the middle of. And the fourth wave is really testing, tracing and precision quarantining. And I'll say a word about each of these as we proceed, I think. The first wave, which is largely finished I should say that our role in it is largely finished, focused largely on the drug Remdesivir which we targeted early as the most promising of the drugs that were out there, which may really be able to impact the course of therapy. I can answer more questions about that if you're interested.
Michael Rosbash:
The second wave was really to address the promise and the manufacturing of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies. And I think in some ways, we had the most impact on the FDA in trying to accelerate the permission to use those antibodies, and also for the manufacturing of those drugs in the United States. The third wave, which we're deep in the middle of as you all know, is vaccines. And we pushed hard to try to get a diverse set of efforts underway here in the US. And a sentence in bold they are at the bottom of this slide, is really that some of us are deeply concerned that the US effort has ignored different vaccine strategies, which for example, other countries, China in particular, is taking serious advantage of.
Michael Rosbash:
And of course, how this all shakes out remains to be seen. I personally now ... and I think several of our group, share this opinion, that we really have to be view vaccines as only one tool in our tool chest. And I think it's important to appreciate that vaccines are really unlikely to be here quickly enough or to be effective enough to solve this problem all by themselves. So they really have to be viewed in concert with the other tools that the country has available. And I think the ones that we're currently focused on that are most important, are PPE or personal protective equipment, on the one hand.
Michael Rosbash:
And then I would say most importantly and to a really large extent, a real failure of our country, is to deal with testing, tracing and what we call, precision quarantining, TTPQ. That is absolutely essential for blocking and preventing this ... from continuing to get completely out of control in the country. And I think the important things to realize here, and I should say that we have not been very successful in broadly transmitting this information either to the executive branch, or for that matter to Congress, is that this is a strategy which has been unbelievably successful all around the world, in big countries and small countries in Europe and Asia.
Michael Rosbash:
And so it works, and it's really critical to understand that it will work in the absence of a vaccine, and that it's quite possible that a vaccine will not work in the absence of testing, tracing and precision quarantining. We are really focused on this effort, this particular effort at the moment, how to convince people, Congress that this is absolutely essential. And really, for those of you interested in biotech or medicine today, precision medicine it is a keyword, Zeitgeist one might almost call it. And this is really precision public health medicine, that is, identify the people who are viremic, who are shedding virus, who are infective and quarantine them or isolate them.
Michael Rosbash:
It's as simple as can be, and in this country it's a tall order as you know. We're trying to scale central testing centers in various parts of the country, so that what is being done today at the Broad Institute, that is a location which will shortly be at a level of testing of 100,000 tests per day can be done in many different locations. And then, I'm also particularly keen on simple and cheap tests that are coming online and can be used in a distributed fashion for example, the different workplaces and schools. And I'm going to tell you in the last minute or two, about something that's ongoing in my lab, and it is ... let's say, at the opposite end of the technical spectrum.
Michael Rosbash:
Because it's about as simple as you can possible get. And the idea, our goal was to develop a test that is inexpensive, sensitive, uses minimal specialized equipment between zero, and extremely little, scalable, can be used between one and a few thousand people. And also uses the easiest to sample specimen, that is saliva that can be collected at home by the individual.
Michael Rosbash:
This is our protocol. This is a probably ill-chosen turn of phrase, a pun, if you will, dead simple, but nonetheless there it is. And so our protocol on the left, and it's contrasted with a much more complex typical PCR protocol on the right, is a 60-minute protocol from beginning to end.
Michael Rosbash:
Simply inactivate the saliva, mix a small amount of it with the LAMP reaction mix, heat for 45 minutes at the end of those 45 minutes, interpret the results, which can be done by eye. And here's an example of what the little test tube looks like, the plastic tube with viral samples on the top set, and no viral samples on the bottom set.
Michael Rosbash:
That's positive on the top that's yellow, and not positive or negative on the bottom which is pink. So, that's it. $2.60 a person, not counting the cost of the labor. And if pooling can be introduced, which we're working on, then the cost of materials and labor will be dramatically reduced. That is, if we can pool five or 10 people into one test.
Michael Rosbash:
I should say that a very simple protocol has been developed by a professor at Cornell, Chris Mason, and it's being currently carried out by firemen and firewomen in Wisconsin who were trained in less than half a day. They're screening city employees as a current research endeavor. And this is a picture of Chris on the left and a bunch of the fire people, I guess one has to say fire people, in their gear, in their protected gear.
Michael Rosbash:
I should say that Chris's brother is the mayor of Racine, Wisconsin, which probably undoubtedly facilitated his ability to get this kind of testing carried out.
Michael Rosbash:
So that's 11 minutes, I'm one minute over. I'm going to hand this over to who is ever next. I look forward to interfacing with you during the question and answer period. Are we good here? Have we turned this over to somebody else?
Alyson Saykin:
Tijana's-
Nancy Dreyer:
Yes, we're good, it took me that millisecond to unmute. Thanks very much. You've given us some interesting things to think about. But I will hold my questions as I hope the rest of you will until we hear from the rest of the panelists. Tijana, you're next. Thank you. Help us understand this glorious vision here.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Thank you Nancy. My pleasure to speak here today. I hope you see my screen now, and you hear me.
Nancy Dreyer:
Yes, we do.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Great.
Tijana Ivanovic:
My name is Tijana Ivanovic and I'm an assistant professor in the biochemistry department here at Brandeis. I joined Brandeis faculty in 2016 with a big mission and to do something different, fundamentally different about targeting viral diseases. This vision is that instead of going after conserved viral mechanisms that are important, and potentially waiting for the next resistance to arise, we could instead go after the very mechanisms for viral adaptation. So those mechanisms that permit viruses to change under external pressure and evolve resistance to treatment.
Tijana Ivanovic:
To get there, I realized early on that simply tools from virology would not be sufficient, and one needed more of an interdisciplinary toolkit. I obtained my PhD in virology at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Max Nibert. I did my postdoc in biophysics in the lab of Steve Harrison, also at Harvard Medical School.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Initially, I learned how to build, designing viruses, essentially engineer any type of mutation in the virus particle structure, including lethal mutation. Mutations that render virus particles not infectious. During my postdoc I learned how to design and build custom microscopes, such as the microscope you see here on the top right.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, this is a fluorescent microscope, that enables us to see individual virus particles one at a time. So hundreds at the same time, but individually. So what you're seeing on the lower left is a movie capturing influenza virus particles as they're merging their liquid envelop to the envelop of the target cell. And in this way they deposit their infectious genome to the target cell's cytoplasm.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Basically combining these types of experiments, the single particle imaging with virus mutations, and theoretical modeling and computer simulations, enabled us to develop molecular level insight into viral mechanisms from the single particle data.
Tijana Ivanovic:
What you see on the lower right is a model of influenza virus. Like COVID, it's coated with the spike proteins, which dance in decorated surface, and these proteins are for COVID and for influenza involved in virus cell entry, both attachment for cell receptors, as well as membrane fusion, which allows viruses to merge their bio-layer to the target cell membrane. What we realized from my postdoctoral work is that while viruses interface target cell membranes with hundreds of such molecules to spike proteins, only about three active neighbors are needed to mediate membrane fusion.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, that immediately told me that in this large redundancy, there has to lie some mechanism of viral evolution of resistance or a viral limitation. But I didn't know at the time, the details of it.
Tijana Ivanovic:
I next joined Brandeis as an assistant professor and I chose Brandeis over a large medical school, which was also offering almost twice as large a startup at a time, precisely because of the types of interdisciplinary interactions that I was going to have an opportunity to have at Brandeis that would be virtually nonexistent at a medical school.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, quickly upon joining, I obtained a seed fund to the NSF MRSEC program, which bridges physical and life sciences, and gave me exposure to diverse set of expertise that could really take my science to the next level.
Tijana Ivanovic:
This year I'm a co-PI on this effort. Just to illustrate some of those interdisciplinary interactions with a few examples, I've been productively collaborating with Hagan in physics, studying viral assembly principles with another physics faculty, Ben Rogers. We co-wrote and won the Provost's Research Awards in 2017, which funded several undergraduate students for their research that derive from chemistry, biophysics and biochemistry majors.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Just to illustrate the real power of Brandeis is that there are really no inter-departmental boundaries. I'm just showing an example of Jonah here, he's a physics PhD student who's working in my lab and you see him actively purifying COVID ACE2 receptor recombinant protein in a soluble form.
Tijana Ivanovic:
You see him here, he's co-advised by Fraden in physics and then here in Brandeis. And when he's not purifying protein in my lab, he's designing origami capsids in Seth Fraden's lab. So, this really allows for not only, basically next level interdisciplinary effort, bigger than the lab alone could achieve.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, here just an illustration of some of the recent findings that are coming out of my lab now. So we basically passed the editorial review and under peer review in Nature Microbiology, with our a study where for the first time we've related virus particle structure to the mechanism of cell entry and membrane infusion.
Tijana Ivanovic:
There are many viruses which assemble into irregular shapes, they're called pleomorphic particles, and some of them including some of the circulating viruses, but also emerging pathogen and pandemic threats examples such as Ebola virus here, they're assembling to the structures that are either small, spherical or very long filamentous particles.
Tijana Ivanovic:
In no field has it been defined how this structure relates to their ability to enter cells or to be inhibited at the level of cell entry. And what we've shown is that these filamentous particles are really reservoirs of resistance to any treatment that individually targets the components of the cell entry machinery on the virus.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, basically, individual targeting of spike proteins, will be effective in the short term, but ultimately lead to resistance because a subset of a population is essentially refractory to any such treatment.
Tijana Ivanovic:
What this findings are telling us that to target viruses and their ability to enter cells in a lasting way, we should do more than just target their individual components that decorate their surface, but we should target virus particles as a whole.
Tijana Ivanovic:
This is where we have an ethical operation now picking up with Seth Fraden's group and Michael Hagan, you'll hear from them next, and where they're engineering these DNA-based origami capsids that do engulf entire virus structures, and which we are currently mainly targeting towards COVID.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, here is just a new virology tool set in my lab that'll enable this type of work and other collaborations that I'll tell you in a second about. Basically what we were able to build our virus part ... So, we have two labs, and SARS-CoV-2 is a BL-3 level pathogen.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So, to enable the slide of this virus we needed to build a sort of chimeric particles that look and behave like COVID-19 viruses, but are not as infectious. So what you're seeing here is our electron microscope images of influenza virus particles, the spherical form coated with SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
Tijana Ivanovic:
What I'm showing you here, these particles going to infect cells, they can turn them green, we can exploit it as a quantitative measure or cell entry. And we show that these particles indeed, depend on the authentic COVID-19 receptor ACE2 to enter cells as the entry could be blocked or inhibited by the soluble ACE2 active domain.
Tijana Ivanovic:
So in order to be able to study the intercellular phase of the virus lifecycle, we're also working with a nonpathogenic NL63 coronavirus, which has the scene genome organization and structure as COVID-19, only it's less pathogenic, and you can can work with it in our lab and you can see in the bottom, how we detect its virus RNA replication intercellularly up to infection.
Tijana Ivanovic:
With this biology tool set, we are now set to use a single particle platform as well as take advantage of a number of exciting collaborations, both in Brandeis with other academic institutions, and as well as with industry.
Tijana Ivanovic:
Some of the questions we're interested in answering is, what is the functional advantage of a mutation in the spike protein, which emerged in February this year and quickly became dominant all over the world? It's important for the virus pathogenicity but the functional explanation is lacking. So this is one of the questions we're interested in, as well as working with Fraden and Hagan groups to engulf entire virus particles in virus-inspired cages.
Tijana Ivanovic:
With NEIDL in Boston, we are asking why some antibodies are protective and others fail to neutralize the virus? With two different companies, we are working to either develop novel peptide inhibitors or SARS-CoV-2 cell entry, as well as test some small molecule inhibitors of coronavirus replication with Onconova Therapeutics. And this is where we're at, and we are very excited to contribute to this important problem, and I look forward to the discussion in a minute.
Nancy Dreyer:
Thank you very much Dr. Ivanovic it's so interesting the level at which you're attacking this problem. And I have to tell you, I was struck by your comment about the no inter-departmental boundaries. I think that's another example of what's so unusual about Brandeis, because that's not something you commonly hear and certainly not from faculty. I want to thank you. And I want to see if we can move on and get some comments next from professors, Michael Hagan and Seth Fraden to round out this presentation before we go into a discussion and hear from you in the audience who I hope are keeping track of your questions.
Nancy Dreyer:
Seth, Michael, who's going to be the presenter next? We're seeing somebody's desktop.
Michael Hagan:
Seth is going to be presenting.
Nancy Dreyer:
Thank you, Michael.
Seth Fraden:
Can you hear me now? Is it audible?
Nancy Dreyer:
We can hear you.
Seth Fraden:
Okay. Very good.
Nancy Dreyer:
We're not seeing any slides you might have, but we can hear you loud and clear.
Seth Fraden:
Okay. Let's go then, let me see if I can get the shared screen working. How about now? Are any slides appearing?
Nancy Dreyer:
I'm seeing your Explorer and looking at the layout of the documents in folder. One of yours, so I'm not sure whose that is.
Seth Fraden:
All right, let me see if I can bring up the Zoom control.
Nancy Dreyer:
And if you'd like, I can show your slides if you have any trouble, since you were kind enough to send them.
Seth Fraden:
So, share screen-
Nancy Dreyer:
I don't know about the rest of you on the phone, but we're all living in this Zoom world and every meeting is a little different and the new challenges. That looks like the slides you sent me. So.
Seth Fraden:
Okay, they're good?
Nancy Dreyer:
Inspired by biology. Perfect. That one should do it. Yep. You're good to go, sir.
Seth Fraden:
Okay. Thank you very much. So ... Let's see if I can bring up my laser pointer here. There we go.
Seth Fraden:
So, I'm Seth Fraden the Director of the Brandeis Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. And we're inspired by biology to engineer new materials that capture the remarkable functionalities found in living organisms. We can't compete with large engineering schools like MIT on their own turf. Instead, we need to play to our strengths, focus on the basic science, be interdisciplinary and visionary. We create new fields on which others follow.
Seth Fraden:
My story today begins in the 1950s with Buckminster Fuller. He was a inventor, a futurist he popularized terms like spaceship earth, and was a famous architect. Here is an example of the Montreal World's Fair Expo, the United States Expo in 1967. And here he's pointing to a dome that was constructed in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1956.
Seth Fraden:
Fuller designed domes that unskilled laborers working without a plan could assemble. In 1956, the U.S. Department of Commerce at the last minute, decided to enter a trade fair in Kabul as part of the Cold War competition with the USSR, and they gave Fuller 30 days to design, fabricate, ship and assemble a 200 foot diameter pavilion in Kabul.
Seth Fraden:
He succeeded in doing this. And this then inspired Brandeis professor Donald Caspar a few years later, drawing inspiration from this Fuller architecture to postulate that viruses were built on the same principles. And here's a picture of Caspar in 1962 in Fuller's living room, talking about this analogy. And here's a picture of Caspar in the Jimmy Fund lab. So Boston Children's Hospital had a basic research lab in the 60s where Caspar was. And the head of that lab, of the children's hospital, Dr. Sidney Farber was on the Brandeis board of trustees, and in 1972, he moved Caspar's lab to Brandeis to the Rosenstiel Center. At that time, Caspar came up with the name structural biology.
Seth Fraden:
He invented this name, and his lab at Brandeis University, the Rosenstiel Center, was the first structural biology lab in the world. Now there are many hundreds of these in academic and in industrial pharma labs throughout the world. Caspar reasoned that viruses were built on analogous principles to Fuller's dome. Fuller had unskilled labors and he said, "Take a blue spoke and attach it to a blue hub, take a red spoke, attach it to a red hub." And there were no overall plan, no picture of what the final structure would look like, just these local building rules were enough to end up with this beautiful structure, some tens of meters in diameter.
Seth Fraden:
Caspar made the analogy that something a hundred million times smaller like this herpes simplex virus, would be built on the same principles. And to illustrate this in more detail, here's an illustration from one of Caspar's papers in 1962, where he says, "Think of a protein molecule, something like your hand, some molecule that has no symmetry at all, the back and the front are different. The left and the right are different. And imagine that there's 60 of us in the room and each of us puts our left hand together into a pile of left hands. And now we want to instruct these 60 lefthanded individuals to assemble into this virus."
Seth Fraden:
So, we gave simple rules. Take your thumb and touch a pinky. So, out of these 60 hands, find a thumb, touch it to somebody's pinky, like here, thumb to pinkie, thumb to pinkie, thumb to pinkie. And then there's a second rule. Take a middle finger, here's a middle finger, and then on the next hand, go to index finger. Then middle finger, index finger, middle finger to index finger. Now you make three proteins linked together in this triangle. And then a third rule, take an index finger to index finger. And with these rules, the 60 hands will assemble into this herpes structure into this structure here. And we're going to build structures based on these triangles.
Seth Fraden:
Where we're going to make objects that have three sides, and then they're going to be linked together through an index finger to an index finger. And it turns out that many, many of the natural viruses, almost all of them follow Caspar's rules of construction. And so where are you going to use this technique called DNA origami to build these molecules? You start with a long single strand of DNA that's in a circular loop, 8,000 basis long, and you design little short strands about 50 basis long. And these short strands act like staples, where they bind from one side of this ring to the other, and they cause it to fold up. And the name of these attachment points are holiday junctions.
Seth Fraden:
And they tie up the DNA and cause it to fold into three dimensions, hence the name origami to fold paper, here we're folding DNA into shapes. And the shape that we made, is this triangle motivated by Caspar's three proteins. And this is like the middle finger to ring finger, and these are cryo electron micrographs. This is data from our DNA where each of these kind of ropey structures is a double strand of DNA. So this is made out of one piece of DNA wrapped 24 times around itself and designed to self assemble. And for the first time in history, we've made a molecule of 500,000 atoms, where we've positioned every atom to sub nanometer accuracy we've designed the shape and the interaction so that they know like the hand, they know to touch index finger to index finger.
Seth Fraden:
Those instructions are built into this molecule. And here, my colleague who's sitting with us today, Mike Hagan, a computational chemist, then did computer simulations where he modeled these DNA origami triangles with their interactions, to see what interaction strengths are needed and concentrations are needed to get high assembly yield, and then we compare his computer simulations, his imagination against the reality in the electron microscope, and we could find conditions where this assembly is highly efficient. And now, not computer simulation but this is actual data from cryo electron microscope, where ... our shapes, then depending on what shape we make and interaction, we can cause them to form much larger self assembled structures, look just like the viruses do.
Seth Fraden:
And here's a photograph from last year at the Rosenstiel Award where I believe Tijana's thesis advisor received the award, Steve Harrison and Don Caspar handed out that award and here we're showing Don our realization of these origami triangles that are based on his theory that he'd developed in 1960. Spanning quite a career here. So now, with this great power to be able to position every atom to sub nanometer resolution, what kind of applications can we do? And so we're going to use these virus assembly principles to deactivate COVID. So in our first test we took hepatitis B, and we took one of our capsids.
Seth Fraden:
We put antibodies, hepatitis B on the inside, and then we showed in the cryo-EM that we could capture the hepatitis B particle. And we used other shapes, these open shapes. You can think of this like a pitcher plant, where a fly comes in and then it's attracted to something sweet at the bottom, but it's sticky and they get trapped and digested. We do the same thing. We put antibodies to the hepatitis B down in the inside, and then the virus comes in and gets trapped. And then to demonstrate that it prevents infection, we did an Elisa test, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, where we put antibodies on the surface, and then if the virus touches the surface which mimics cell fusion or infection, then we add another antibody with an enzyme that if you give it a substrate turns orange.
Seth Fraden:
So this is like any kind of strip test, pregnancy test, where if you have the target molecule, it'll turn a color. While if the virus is protected by our DNA origami cap, then it can't attach to the cell surface, it washes away and it stays clear. And so then the capsid prevents virus from touching, and then to demonstrate it, we ran Elisa tests where we get up to 99% blockage of the hepatitis B as a function of the number of these origami course.
Seth Fraden:
Our next step then is to move from the hepatitis B to COVID. And I want to point out that in traditional antibody cures, if you have 100 spikes which are targets of infection on the COVID, the antibody has to block all 100.
Seth Fraden:
While in our approach we separate infection from binding. And so only one, as few as one antibodies, needs to bind to the virus on the inside, and then the shell is what prevents the infection and so you can get 100% infection with one antibody binding. So I see I've gone over time. My apologies, and thank you for your attention.
Nancy Dreyer:
That's really super interesting. Thank you so much for this presentation. Imagine going from my head is spinning as maybe some of the other ones to go from buckyballs to the optimal origami shape for capturing COVID. It's really quite fascinating. I want to open it up for questions and ask people, you can either raise your hand or not, or I want to give professor Hagen a chance to add anything. I didn't mean to cut you off Michael, anything you'd like to add to?
Michael Hagan:
No, we planned to optimize time that Seth would say everything.
Nancy Dreyer:
Well, it's very impressive work. We are proud of you. I know that. But tell me, you said that Brandeis has ... There or Seth said that Brandeis has neither a material science nor an engineering department, and yet you're creating these amazing discoveries. How do undergraduates participate or benefit from this prestigious center that you guys have built?
Seth Fraden:
Well, we do have undergraduates who are involved in the research and the ones who work full time in summer, and do a senior thesis often end up on publications. So they're fully engaged and then go on to ... We hope to encourage them to stay in STEM careers. But we also hope that we someday can take our research excellence and use that to start a small engineering major for the students as well.
Nancy Dreyer:
Well, that's interesting as somebody who woke up when I was through the process of the Brandeis undergraduate education, took me a while to get there, but these opportunities are stimulating. I had one more question I was going to raise, but I want to turn to you in the audience. One thing you could do is turn on your video. I don't see hands raised, but I know we've got people who think about this from a variety of ways. And you've taken your time to participate in this discussion, and I want to make sure that we address what you're thinking about and wondering about and give you a chance to pose your questions to these professors.
Nancy Dreyer:
So, I can raise another question or I can also turn to the audience and give you a chance to ... If you click on your picture and the three dots appear in the upper right, you can unmute yourself. So, let me be quiet for a moment and see if somebody would like to speak.
Mickey Schuloff:
May I ask a question?
Nancy Dreyer:
Please.
Mickey Schuloff:
I'm Mickey Schuloff. Question is for Michael Rosbash. I listened to your comments about precision quarantining, and I have a hard time reconciling what seems to be going on in the general population, where if I understand the CDC comments correctly from the popular media, roughly 20% of the population of the US may already have an infection. When New York did a random test in the Bronx, they actually showed almost 50% in certain parts of the Bronx. If 20% were right, it would mean 70 million people in the US are infected. And that all of the new confirmed cases from testing, are merely finding people out of that 70 million. Is that a correct interpretation? And if so, does precision quarantining stand a chance?
Michael Rosbash:
So I think the short answer to your question, actually were multiple questions there is, no, no and no.
Nancy Dreyer:
Maybe you could elaborate.
Michael Rosbash:
I intend to. I definitely intend to. So, let me say first of all that I think ... I'm representing the dozen people in my group here.
Michael Rosbash:
So, consider this to be a consensus. I think the numbers you raise are really not believed by anybody, number one. And number two, I would guess that an upper limit for New York ... And of course, this is people who have been infected or not currently infected is something like 20% with the country may be being at 5-10% with very different numbers in different geographical locations. So, for example I think if New York would be as much... people who have been infected in Boston or Massachusetts might be 5-10%.
Michael Rosbash:
Now, that's of course people who have been infected... Be defined as antibody positive. But that's completely different from those people who are viremic, who actually are infectious. And what I think the public health challenge is, is to identify people who are infectious, which is a much smaller number of people, and to then try and encourage them to remove themselves. Of course, if this were China, they would be removed. If it's a Singapore or South Korea or Germany, where there's much more, let's say social spirits, they would self remove themselves at that point from circulation for two weeks so that nobody else gets infected.
Michael Rosbash:
I think what's confusing about the absolute numbers and also the distinction between having been infected, which is not infectious, but having antibody on the one hand, versus being infectious, which is the people we're really concerned with those who can continue to spread the virus. That's a much smaller number.
Nancy Dreyer:
Thank you. It's interesting. Maybe I can raise a question while people are thinking if they ... Are there hands shown? I'm afraid I'm having trouble seeing the hands, but if somebody would like to speak, please unmute yourself and jump in. I'm welcoming questions.
Victor Shear:
There's a recent paper about antibody persistence, a study done by Kings College in London, and it was pre-published a few days ago, and it indicates a dramatic drop off in antibodies within one to two months for a spectrum, I think the total body studied was about 100 people. About half of them medical workers, and the other half patients across the spectrum of severity. What are the implications do you think for vaccines, given this kind of report? And have you seen this paper?
Michael Rosbash:
I haven't seen the paper, but it doesn't surprise me, or I should say I haven't read the precise paper, but that general principle has been discussed in detail among our group. I think one of the real question marks about public health screening via antibody presence is the extent to which antibodies are both durable and are signatures of resistance of the individual.
Michael Rosbash:
A major question is the extent to which T-cell immunity, that is cellular immunity, as opposed to antibodies, is really important for resistance. And so that's just not clear at the moment. That's a major issue for the vaccine strategies that are being employed, many of them, which are more focused on eliciting antibodies than on cellular immunity.
Michael Rosbash:
I think the jury is really out and the general principle you're raising is, is it possible that antibodies will turn out to be a false indication? Or even a nondurable indication of resistance. And the answer is yes. And so, this reinforces my point. Let's say another piece of evidence, another reason for thinking that vaccines might not be a panacea, right? Because you can imagine you could vaccinate people and maybe three months, four months, six months later, they're sensitive again to infection, right?
Victor Shear:
The paper is actively suggesting that that might be a possibility.
Michael Rosbash:
Right. I think it's been viewed as a possibility. I think the people who study viruses, Tijana can probably reinforce my point here, is that the viruses are unbelievably clever in figuring out how to evade their host's resistance mechanism. And so, one of the tricks that viruses uses is to try and disable or weaken the immune system of their host either acutely or chronically. So, this is the reason why one should not put all of one's eggs in one basket, in this case, the vaccine basket, right?
Victor Shear:
Right. The paper is drawing a bit of an analogy to coronaviruses that cause the common cold and say that ... I'm no expert in this but they say that you can get reinfected annually by the same virus and that there's a significant drop off in the antibody level and it becomes non-protective after a few months
Michael Rosbash:
I can't speak to that particular pre-print. Of course, we also have a problem, a worldwide scientific problem of pre-prints coming fast and furious, and you never quite know for some time what's solid and what isn't? But the general principle that you're espousing that the paper espouses is completely credible.
Nancy Dreyer:
Is it fair to say that the level of antibodies corresponds to clinically active disease?
Michael Rosbash:
No. On the contrary. The level of antibody ... Sorry, let me rephrase what you said. The level of antibody is supposed to correspond to the severity of previous disease, right? Because the antibody lags behind your actual disease depending on what antibody we're talking about it by, let's say two to three weeks in the case of durable antibodies, but even that's not clear. So for example, one quite reasonable hypothesis, and I emphasize hypothesis here, is that people who have mild disease, have stronger antibody protection, whereas people who get very severe disease have weaker protection. And so that would, if you will suggest the opposite correspondence, right?
Michael Rosbash:
More severe the disease, maybe the weaker and of course, people who are older, are suspected of getting more severely ill because their immune system is weaker in general than people who are younger. So, it's really a moving landscape.
Nancy Dreyer:
Right. So thank you for getting the right context on that. Dr. Cortez, did I hear that you had a question? You may be on mute and I certainly will open it up to other questions, and I do need to say that welcome to professor ... Provost Lisa Lynch, who also has joined us. So we've got a good audience all the way around.
Steven Kaye:
I had a question it's a Stephen Kaye speaking.
Nancy Dreyer:
Hi Steve.
Steven Kaye:
It's really to any of the panel. Professor Rosbash talked earlier about precision testing and what we're starting to see in Germany, and somewhat in the UK as well is, large corporates are starting to test their staff on a weekly or fortnightly basis for COVID. Tests are usually antigen testing, PCR tests. Do you see this as a way forward in the US? Is this something that you could see will happen or just is there not enough will to get on that path?
Michael Rosbash:
Well, let's see. I think it's definitely the way to go. I think at least if you can do it twice weekly testing, I should say that's Brandeis' plan. So, in any organization, that's Amazon's plan, as far as I know from the two calls we've had with them. Is somebody get some background noise there? That's not me, is it?
Victor Shear:
Yes.
Michael Rosbash:
Okay. It is me.
Nancy Dreyer:
No, please continue.
Michael Rosbash:
Yeah. So, I think it's absolutely the correct strategy and of course what Germany has had in place for quite some time and what the UK has finally come around, and the US is painfully lacking is a national strategy, which would actually endorse, and then supply the materials and the knowhow, so that such a thing can be carried out.
Michael Rosbash:
So, we're in a piecemeal fly by the seat of your pants situation here in the US as you know. I think every organization which is looking after its employees, its students, is considering such a thing if they can manage to pull it off. And of course, that's why I ended with those last couple of minutes because, a very simple test that could be carried out in every nurse's office, in every K-12 school, offers itself as exactly that kind of a test.
Nancy Dreyer:
Thank you-
Jay Ocuin:
Dr. Rosbash, Jay Ocuin. At Brandeis, you're going to test the students since they have twice a week, what's your turnaround time?
Michael Rosbash:
I'm going to hand this over to Lisa Lynch who's on the call, and she's in charge of this kind of thing. And I think I should defer to her here about-
Jay Ocuin:
Is your test ... You mentioned that it takes 60 minutes. Do you have to send that test out or you do it by-
Michael Rosbash:
No, no. The whole idea is, that was the firehouse example, that's done in-house. In fact, you have the ... That's so that any school, any grammar school, any workplace ... And my favorite example is an auto body shop with five employees, can do this right there with minimal equipment, and then they can test their employees as often as they want, to verify that nobody's sick and nobody's infectious, and nobody's going to get anybody sick. But Lisa, why don't you speak about Brandeis' plan?
Lisa Lynch:
So, what we're doing Dr. Ocuin is in collaboration with the Broad Institute, we're going to be testing all of our students on campus and our faculty and staff who are on campus on a regular basis three days or more. They'll be getting tested twice a week. It's a PCR test and anterior nasal swab.
Lisa Lynch:
So, it's not the tickle the brain, but it is the sort of swabbing, both nostrils. Pretty quick, we've been running a pre-pilot last week of that test on campus. From the moment somebody shows up for their appointment to when they're finished, it takes about two minutes to do. Then we have two locations on campus. We'll be doing that in a courier that will pick up those tests once a day. And we're getting the results back in just a little over 24 hours from the Broad, which is quite good.
Lisa Lynch:
It's a lot faster than the tests that we had been doing for symptomatic individuals with quest, which right now in Massachusetts is taking about six or seven days to get those results back. So, as Michael said, the goal here is to know sooner rather than later, if someone is testing positive, and then to have that individual isolate immediately and to begin contact type tracing right away, as opposed to waiting seven days, which we know makes it much harder for us to then address the issue of others who may have been exposed.
Michael Rosbash:
As you can imagine, I'm hoping that our tests will receive FDA approval, and maybe we'll be able to substitute it here on campus for the Broad. What the Broad is doing, it's cheaper and faster, but we're not there yet, and so who knows?
Nancy Dreyer:
So, it's fascinating to have those choices. I wanted to turn to Dr. Cortez, I heard you had a question. Do you want to unmute yourself or? Yeah, upper right hand, there are three dots. Perfect. Nope. You were unmuted a second ago. One more click, sir. Yes. We can. We should be able to hear you. So sorry for that.
Lisa Lynch:
So maybe perhaps if you use the chat function and put your question in the chat function, then we could ... If you could type that in. Just click on that little button-
Nancy Dreyer:
That's just what I was going to suggest too. If you type that Dr. Cortez I'll be glad to read it for you. While you're typing that, Dr. Fruchtman has a question.
Steve Fruchtman:
I had to figure out how to unmute myself. I hope that was successful. I look-
Nancy Dreyer:
You were successful.
Steve Fruchtman:
Excellent. So I just want to ask a question to the experts, even if it takes ... Dr. Rosbash mentioned 24 hours to get results I believe, that would be fabulous. But in the real world currently, even three days is pretty quick. So, is that realistic to have to wait? I wish we had better options. What are you going to do with the students while the test is pending? Are they going to isolate? Is that realistic? What is the guidance? In my view, it's unrealistic to expect the kids pending the test results, and let's assume it takes three days, that they can isolate during that period of time.
Lisa Lynch:
This is Lisa Lynch responding. For people who are symptomatic and that's students, faculty and staff, for the students who are living on campus, what we will ask them if on the basis of consultation with the health center when they take the test, we will ask them to isolate if they're symptomatic. For faculty and staff who are symptomatic, we're not inviting them to campus to spread COVID. We're asking them to work with their PCP to have the test off-campus and again, not to come to campus if they're exhibiting any symptoms. Everybody coming to campus will do a daily health check, independent of the testing.
Lisa Lynch:
And we are asking if they present any flags on that, they'll need to talk to our health center or occupational health nurse before they come to campus. But the goal of the testing I'm referring to for the Broad is for asymptomatic individuals, and to do that on a regular basis. So literally every week as part of the class schedule and everything else that students and faculty and staff will be doing, they're going to have twice a week that they would be getting a COVID test or SARS-CoV-2 test as part of their schedule. But we would not have them isolate until we got the results back. And the Broad is saying that they can get the results back in 24 hours and that's been our experience thus far in week two of doing that with the Broad.
Nancy Dreyer:
Thank you. It seems to be the prudent approach that many organizations are taking in these challenging times. Turning back to our audience, to give others a chance to question if you would like. While you're thinking, I just wanted to raise one question and direct it back to Seth and Michael. You talked about how your origami capsules assemble on their own. Are there other complex and functional structures that it can be assembled with these kinds of principles? And is this something that ... What are the limitations for manufacturing? How compost a structure can you induce to self assemble?
Seth Fraden:
So, at one limit would be something like a automobile, right? You'd take all the parts of an automobile and you throw them together and then shake and see them assemble. So, we think that's too complex to work that way, but the viruses again, learning from nature, the viruses seemed to follow this plan up to a certain size, and then they switch over to a completely different physical principle, which we call frustrated self-assembly, and Hagen is an expert in that. And maybe he could comment on what that principle entails.
Michael Hagan:
So, I would say that viruses employ multiple principles, and depending on what size they're assembling, they may use one more than the other. So many of these viruses use what we call the Casper clue principles, which is what Seth showed. And they use that all the way up to many thousands of protein subunits, but when they're making the bigger viruses, if they were just using those, what Seth described as local rules, it would end up being very inefficient for them, they'd have to code for many different kinds of proteins, so what they do is they couple that mechanism to a few other approaches, one where they'll use essentially a scaffold, one approach being you first make a smaller shell, and then you can assemble a bigger shell around it, or you can use certain long molecules to help measure distances along the shell.
Michael Hagan:
Then a more speculative idea, which Seth brought up is that they're also using this mechanism of frustration, whereas they're assembling a large shell, there's a strain. So an unfavorable energy that's building up as the shell gets bigger and bigger, and eventually that strain forces the assembly to terminate. And so we think that viruses use essentially all three of these approaches, and so one of the things that we're doing as part of the MRSEC is trying to understand what are the limits of these various approaches? How large of a structure can you get to actually assemble with a precise size, but where all of the instructions for assembly are built into its individual subunits?
Seth Fraden:
The therapeutic consequences are that there are certain bottlenecks, there are certain weak points in the virus assembly. And if we understand the principle and we can target those weak points therapeutics, that then will prevent the virus from successfully assembling.
Michael Hagan:
Exactly. For example, some viruses actually used their nucleic acid as a scaffold to assemble around. So if you can understand how that works, you can come up with ways to block that and stop the virus from being infectious.
Nancy Dreyer:
Super interesting. I see we have a question from Denise Selden, I want to give her a chance to raise that please.
Denise Selden:
Yes. Can you hear me?
Nancy Dreyer:
Yes, we can.
Denise Selden:
Good.
Denise Selden:
Dr. Rosbash mentioned that he felt that it is unlikely that a vaccine will be developed quickly enough. And I guess I'd be interested in given reasonable, not rushed or emergency expectations for developing a vaccine. What is the timeline that he would think is reasonable given the number of candidates and the seemingly large array of approaches that are being used?
Michael Rosbash:
So, I'm not quite sure exactly how I couched my words. So, let me just try it again. I think the idea that I'm trying to emphasize is that a combination of speed and efficacy. So, if we were to depend on vaccines to snuff out what we're currently facing, this would have to be really fast and it would have to be incredibly efficacious in order to do that, because we're really on the edge of a precipice. And so the question is, how likely are both of those to really happen? So, let's say by October, by September, October, perhaps one might even think of it as by before election day, if we could use that that date as a benchmark. Will we have something?
Michael Rosbash:
I think the chance of having something is possible, the chance of having something efficacious is possible, the chance of having something that fast, and efficacious, and in sufficient quantities, which is a third dimension of complication that is the manufacturing for a country of 330,000,000 people, I think the chance of all of those happening let's say if each one is a probability of 0.5, you can do the conditional probability and you realize the chance of all of that happening is really quite small.
Michael Rosbash:
I think the chance of everything really falling in line before let's say spring of 2021, is rather unlikely, which is only to ... Not that we shouldn't try, but that it's only to emphasize how all of the other tools at our disposal of which the one which is so simple.
Michael Rosbash:
This is like not letting your kid drink and drive or something. You want to keep your kids safe when they're 16 and 16 and a half when they start to drive. There's only a few small things that you need to teach them, right? Don't speed and don't drink and drive and et cetera. So this is not rocket science. However, I'm going to now having the floor, I want to turn to my colleagues Seth then Tijana and Michael, and ask them a question. Do you envision the origami strategy for a vaccine or for an antiviral as actually injecting the DNA or programming people to produce the shell or the DNA? Let's say five years from now, how do you imagine this general strategy might be implemented?
Nancy Dreyer:
I'm going to jump in, and I think we need to do our takeaways from each person, because I think we could probably stay another hour or two on the phone, and at least some of us would be in trouble, starting with me. And I know there's ... I think we have still a pending question from Dr. Fruchtman that I want to get that and then go around to have the discussion and see if there's anything else burning. Dr. Frackman you had a question. I'm so sorry, Dr. Rosbash.
Michael Rosbash:
Not at all.
Steve Fruchtman:
So can you hear me?
Nancy Dreyer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steve Fruchtman:
Fabulous.
Steve Fruchtman:
So, the experts ... And thank you for these great talks. What's more likely to be successful, sort of like the HIV situation with therapeutics has changed the scenario impressively? Or a vaccine approach? If you had a million dollars to bet or to invest in research, would you put it into vaccine research or therapeutic research?
Michael Rosbash:
That's an outstanding question, especially the venture capitalist way you phrased it. I'll give you my personal opinion. I'm a little more enthusiastic. If we leave manufacturing out of the issue, because the therapeutics also have manufacturing issues, and then that requires that as a balance. I'm scientifically a little more enthusiastic, little more positive about the therapeutic side of this, than I am about the vaccine side of that. Although I would be doing all of it full speed ahead since I'm not wildly confident in that guess, but if you force me to choose one or the other, it would be therapeutics.
Steve Fruchtman:
Any naysayers to Dr. Rosbash?
Tijana Ivanovic:
I'm also on the other page of therapeutics for the sort of quicker, short term effectiveness. So we have a big problem and it's going on now. I think to stop it, my money is on the therapeutic. But for the lasting effect of eradicating virus potentially, and it's a more of a longer term goal, my money would be on the vaccine. So, I say, invest in therapeutics now and vaccines more longer term.
Nancy Dreyer:
I appreciate somebody who's willing to put a bet forward, and I think that's interesting others? Care to comment?
Michael Hagan:
I would just second what Tijana said.
Nancy Dreyer:
Okay. That's two votes for the treatments not the vaccines, interesting question you've got there.
Michael Rosbash:
Two votes for the vaccines.
Nancy Dreyer:
I thought I heard that was for the therapeutics.
Michael Rosbash:
No, the long game.
Nancy Dreyer:
All right, I got to get my hearing tested for these Zoom meetings, but thank you. Thank you for setting that straight. I wanted to give every everyone who spoke to us today a chance to give a key takeaway. Seth, maybe I can turn to you. We'll do last first and Dr. Rosbash you get the last word, but I'll go for Seth and Michael and then Tijana, and then to you Michael. Seth, key takeaway?
Seth Fraden:
I've been at Brandeis for 40 years now. I came as a 22-year-old doing as a technician in the lab of Casper, who I spoke about in my presentation. Then I stayed as a graduate student and then as a professor and I've experienced this institution as a highly collaborative and ambitious institution. So, over the years, I've seen us grow in materials research, and engineering to where we compete with the biggest and best programs in the country. We out competed MIT this year, where they for the first time in 60 years, were rejected in their application for materials research center and we succeeded. So, how are we able to punch above our weight class?
Seth Fraden:
It's because small is beautiful. We're such a small place where we know each other and we need to work together across departmental boundaries, across the disciplines, and we need to cooperate to survive. We can't compete with schools like MIT on their own turf, their department of mechanical engineering has more faculty than all of the people in science altogether. We need to create new fields where no one else is in, because if we try to compete on the playing field of the large schools, we'll be crushed. We need to make our own fields, and then they follow us. But in order to do that, because we are small, we need resources that have to be invested wisely and judiciously and with as much synergy as possible.
Seth Fraden:
And with that kind of support, we can continue to thrive and then pivot to when the nation needs us to respond to emergencies, such as we're facing with this global pandemic.
Nancy Dreyer:
Certainly an impressive story and telling and something when maybe it's that size and that inter departmental cooperation and collaboration that's sparking all these ideas. Michael, anything you wanted to add?
Michael Hagan:
No, I would just second it, that how easy and wonderful that the collaboration opportunities are here, which is like Tijana, a big reason I came to Brandeis instead of some other large places, is it, as an engineer trying to study biology I felt I really needed real collaborations with life scientists, and it's just been fabulous at Brandeis, the ability to do that. I've had a ton of very productive collaborations and it wouldn't have been possible at other places. So again, as long as we have the resources to facilitate that, it's a really great thing.
Nancy Dreyer:
I really appreciate that. I wanted to give Tijana and Michael a chance to give us any last thoughts and then Ron, I'd like to turn to you to give the closing, if you will. Tijana, anything to add that we haven't thought about, or you want to make sure we keep in our minds?
Tijana Ivanovic:
Yeah. I guess the big point of my talk was how new transformative ways of thinking and approaching targeting viruses can evolve both from interdisciplinary approach, from interdisciplinary interactions within Brandeis. But I think what's happening now with this pandemic is that it feels like there's an interdisciplinary or interinstitutional ... There's interaction now across the entire world, right? Everybody's coming together and this is the personal examples with a few interesting collaborations and different academic collaborations, but the way everybody is suddenly willing to talk to each other and work with each other to come to a solution across the globe is really powerful and gives me some optimism that we can tackle this.
Nancy Dreyer:
I appreciate that very much. Thank you. Mike turning to you and then to you Ron.
Michael Rosbash:
Let's see, what can I add here? I guess many of you know that, although I didn't talk about collaborations here, that my own history of Brandeis is through a 20 year, more than 20 year collaboration with my colleague Jeff Hall. And although we were both in the biology department, we had very different training and did completely different kinds of work, which we decided to bring together, join together to try to address a problem which I think we made some progress on. So it's really the small size of Brandeis inter, intra as well as interdepartmental has really been instrumental in my career. I should say that I've known Seth for almost his entire 40 years of Brandeis, and just to give you a little flavor here, our kids, we met because our kids went to the magnificent daycare center at Brandeis where every single faculty members' kids has gone to.
Michael Rosbash:
Ans all of you know, you make your friends through the other parents of your kid's friends, et cetera. So, small is beautiful, like Seth said. I'll also emphasize what Tijana said, this is a worldwide pandemic, and I think our aspects of our government may be unique in not embracing the international view on how to address and ultimately solve this problem. So, I owe a lot to Brandeis and I think we're going to continue to do great things in the future under the leadership of Liebowitz who I'm going to cede the floor to here.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you Michael. Thank you. First of all, Nancy, thank you for hosting and for emceeing this wonderful event. Secondly, faculty colleagues, thank you so much for not only this presentation here but for the work you do on COVID and everything else you do to make Brandeis what it is, as you've all described and personally in my four years here, that's what I've discovered.
Ron Liebowitz:
It's an unusual place that's based on incredible collaboration. Small size might be it, but it is also the personalities involved, and the culture that we're fortunate to have since its beginning in 1948. So, thank you, and especially thank you to all of those who joined the call to share the pride of this Brandeis faculty and the excellence that it shows today. So, thank you all. It was wonderful hearing this presentation.
Nancy Dreyer:
I know we're out of time I wanted to thank all the presenters and the organizers, and thank the listeners. I mean, as one of you, and all of us, we know how much Brandeis depends on us. It's really helpful to get this view into what you guys are doing. Very impressive, and very much appreciated. With that I want to thank you for your time and want you all to stay safe.