Calling all recovered COVID-19 patients. Some of America’s top research scientists need you.

And what reason could be more urgent than this? They’re hoping you can help them find a vaccine, a drug or some other treatment before this killer disease wipes out thousands or millions more.

“Over the last few weeks, we’ve eliminated every other aspect of our research and focused entirely on SARS-CoV-2,” the novel coronavirus behind COVID-19.

That’s Paul Bieniasz, a world-renowned virologist at Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s East Side. With his wife and longtime research partner, Theodora Hatziioannou, the 52-year-old British-born scientist spent decades unlocking the deadly secrets inside the HIV virus that causes AIDS. That’s on hold now. At their busy lab and at other top labs around the world, it’s all coronavirus all the time.

Theodora Hatziioannou Rockefeller University

This global effort is the only thing that can stop a second wave of infections and let the rest of us head safely outside. And it’s only fitting that so much of this lifesaving work is happening in the hottest of hot spots that is New York, at premier research institutions like Columbia, Cornell and Rockefeller universities. “When something like this happens, it’s all hands on deck to try and tackle it,” Bieniasz said as he pulled himself briefly from his virology lab. “I can’t help but feel a sense of personal responsibility. Things that might normally bother a scientist, like competition and credit-—we put all that stuff aside and get on with the problem at hand.”

These crazy days, that means racing down several paths simultaneously.

One of the more immediately promising involves the neutralizing antibodies that float in the plasma of recovered patients. The hope is that these antibodies might help the next wave of victims fight infection—and might even protect frontline health-care workers from getting infected in the first place. But not all plasmas are created equal. They need to be measured and sorted out.

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“What we are finding,” Bieniasz said, “is a very, very large variation in the amount of neutralizing antibodies in people who have recovered. There are some people whose plasma is very potent and some whose plasma is virtually inactive.”

So which is which? “It’s something you’d want to know before treating people.”

That’s where the recovering patients come in. As Bieniasz’s twitter feed pleads: “For those in the New York area who have recovered from #COVID19 and would like to contribute to finding new treatments: Phone: 1-800-RUCARES (1-800-782-2737). E-mail: RUCARES@rockefeller.edu.” Need extra incentive? “Compensation and parking are provided,” notes the accompanying brochure.

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“The best donors are likely to be those people with the highest amounts of neutralizing antibodies,” Bieniasz said.

The married researchers are collaborating with Michel Nussenzweig, who heads Rockefeller’s molecular immunology laboratory and hopes to clone the antibody genes from the most promising recovered patients. “Once you have the gene cloned, you can make it In large quantities and really scale this up,” Bieniasz said. Nussenzweig used a similar approach with great success against AIDS. He too is seeking cured-from-COVID volunteers.

In their own lab, Bieniasz and Hatziioannou are doing cutting-edge things with chimeric molecules, “molecules that are half-antibody and half part of the reception for SARS-CoV-2.” This one is a bit too complicated to summarize in a few short sentences. Just know he says the experiments, though speculative, are potentially game changing. We should all take him at his word and say, “Good luck.”

As the research presses furiously forward, a lot of this is still in the hands of laypeople, Bieniasz emphasized. “Everybody’s staring at the same graphs of the death rate and the infection rate,” he said. “We can see the curve starting to bend in the U.S.A., higher and later than in most other countries. But everything is still on the table. If we all stay inside, that curve will come down more quickly. If we relax our distancing interventions, the opposite will happen.”

And more people will die.

So is he hopeful?

“I’m trying to get out of the business of making predictions,” he said. “This disease was imminently predictable in hindsight, but sadly wasn’t in foresight. But yes, I am very hopeful.”

Something will work, he said.

“I’m sorry if I am struggling for words here,” he added. “But this isn’t just personal for me. Studying viruses is part of our family life. It’s been that way since grad school. My wife and I, we’ve spent all these years studying the fundamental aspects of HIV. Some of it is applicable to patients, but a large part of it has also been an academic pursuit, pushing back the front of ignorance rather than saving the world.”

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Now, there’s a whole wide world in need of saving.

“We find ourselves with a set of skills and an emergency to match,” the Rockefeller researcher said, before heading back to his wife and laboratory. “It almost wasn’t a choice for us to change what we were doing and start working on SARS-CoV-2.”