The laboratory lights burned long and bright during the AIDS crisis.

San Diego researchers coalesced into an army that helped find ways to detect, describe and stop one of the worst pandemics in history.

More than three decades later, there’s a new uprising.

From the research towers at UC San Diego to the pharmaceutical companies in Carlsbad, the region’s huge science community has joined the fight against COVID-19, which has killed more than 100,000 people worldwide.


“This is a from-the-ground-up movement that’s doing everything from screening for drugs to using 3-D printers to make ventilators,” said Dr. David Brenner, vice chancellor of health sciences at UCSD.

“I have never seen an entire scientific community change direction so fast to focus on one problem.”

The response involves a group of elite institutions, including UCSD, one of the nation’s biggest research schools; the J. Craig Venter Institute, whose namesake helped sequence the human genome; and the Salk Institute, whose founder, Jonas Salk, created the first effective vaccine against polio.

The coronavirus is so contagious many of the institutions are prohibiting scientists from entering their labs unless their work is deemed essential — a restriction that largely didn’t exist in the early days of AIDS.


But work is getting done, including UCSD’s move to begin human trials of the experimental drug remdesivir.

The Union-Tribune turned to 10 scientists to find out what they’re doing, precisely when they realized how bad things might get, and how the pandemic is affecting them personally.

Richard H. Scheuermann

Campus Director, J. Craig Venter Institute

Not so long ago, there was a horrific outbreak of the Ebola virus in Africa. Nearly 30,000 people died, generating grim headlines. Scheuermann’s friends asked if he was worried about it. The answer was no; Ebola doesn’t spread easily.


“But I was worried about SARS-coronavirus and avian influenza,” Scheuermann said, who travels the world on research. “I knew it would become a big issue if these viruses ever became transmissible to humans. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.

Richard Scheuermann (J. Craig Venter Institute)

“I’m monitoring whether the virus is evolving and changing. Will it become more virulent? More transmissible? We’re seeing evidence of new lineages, but the basic characteristics haven’t changed — yet. We need to keep looking. If it evolves, we need to be ready to mitigate.”

Gut-check moment: “We first heard about what was going on in China on Dec. 31. I started to worry on Jan. 23 when the first coronavirus case was reported in Washington state. I thought, ‘Holy cow, it’s spreading rapidly. We don’t have any anti-viral drugs against this, we don’t have a vaccine. And there’s a high mortality rate. This is dangerous.’”


Personal view: “I have an adult son with stage-IV cancer and he’s getting ready to undergo chemotherapy. On top of this, there’s a risk that he might get infected with the virus. We’re just trying to hold it together.”

Erica Ollmann Saphire

Professor, Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Research, La Jolla Institute for Immunology

Erica Ollmann Saphire, structural virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. (Ken Hansen)

More than anything, the world needs a vaccine to protect against COVID-19. That’s probably a year away. To bridge the gap, Saphire is trying to find human antibodies that can provide immediate immunity to the virus for front-line workers, as well as those who have become sick.


She’s used to the pressure. In 2014, she rallied researchers around the world to work together to find antibodies against the Ebola virus. Based on the collaborative structure she built, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently asked her to head up a larger effort: uniting researchers to compare the thousands of antibodies against COVID-19 being discovered around the world and recommend which ones to advance to the clinic.

Gut-check moment: After getting a series of calls from the Gates Foundation, Saphire sat in a big yellow chair at the institute and put her head in her hands.

“I thought about how much we’re going to have to give up on a professional and personal level,” she said. “We’ve built so many programs for Ebola, Lassa, measles. Those are now on hold. The world has a more urgent problem, a coronavirus that spread before we even really knew it existed.

“It’s like a wall of water coming at you, a tsunami. We’re going to have to build a ship to get out of it. I already don’t see my husband and children enough. But we must deal with this. We cannot fail.”


Personal view: Saphire and her husband installed a hammock-like swing inside their house to give their two sons an outlet to burn off excess energy. “It turned out to be a good idea.”

Sumit Chanda

Director, Immunity and Pathogenesis Program, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute

Sumit Chanda (Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute)

Chanda got hit by some startling news in January when one of his postdoctoral researchers returned from a trip to China. A new SARS virus was spreading in the country. It was under-reported. And it was deadly.


“I didn’t have a crystal ball, but we knew this could go global and become very bad,” said Chanda, a virologist who has long studied Ebola and HIV/AIDS.

He quickly reached out to colleagues at a university in Hong Kong and arranged to send them thousands of drug compounds, developed at Scripps Research, that could be tested for their use against the virus. He also sent them equipment to do the screening. Chanda’s team then used an iPhone to coach them.

He dove into the same sort of testing in his own lab.

“We’re validating drugs identified by our colleagues in Hong Kong which have already been tested in humans to confirm that they have anti-viral properties,” Chanda said. “This is the fastest way to get into COVID-19 patients.”


Gut-check moment: “I saw reports on TV about the people who’d come down with the virus on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. It was like the canary in the coal mine — a likely harbinger of what would happen worldwide.”

Personal view: “The virus is bad. But I’m extremely optimistic about what will happen in San Diego and California. We’re seeing the flattening of the curve. People have heeded the call for social distancing. We’re doing well.”

Christina Chambers

Professor of pediatrics, UC San Diego School of Medicine

Christina Chambers (UC San Diego School of Medicine)


Chambers is exploring one of the most disturbing questions to arise from the outbreak: How will the virus affect pregnant and breastfeeding women, and their babies?

She just launched a national study with pregnant volunteers who are infected by the virus or symptomatic for COVID-19 to assess whether the respiratory disease poses harm to mothers or the unborn. In a second study, breastfeeding women are providing Chambers with milk samples to determine if they contain the virus, and if maternal antibodies to COVID-19 are transferred to the feeding infant.

She is not finding it hard to locate volunteers.

“Women are incredibly altruistic about wanting to contribute to science. It might not help them or their children, but it will help others in the future,” said Chambers, the mother of three children.


Gut-check moment: “It came while I watched things unfold in Wuhan and Italy. I knew the high rates of transmission meant many pregnant and breastfeeding women would be exposed and that their comprised immune system could put them at greater risk for complications.”

Personal view: “National studies usually take months, sometimes years, to plan and launch. We’ve done it in days, despite the fact everyone was working from home. I couldn’t be more proud.”

Janelle Ayres

Physiologist and infectious disease specialist, Salk Institute

Janelle Ayes (Salk Institute)


Usually, a person’s immune system turns on when it’s needed, slays an infection, then turns off. But the system sometimes attacks a person after a virus is no longer a threat. “The body’s response, not the virus, is damaging the patient,” Ayres said.

Physicians are seeing this happen in people who are critically ill with COVID-19. Treatment for these patients focuses on both anti-viral therapies and on providing supportive care in order to prevent deadly organ damage.

Ayres’ work suggests that helping patients’ bodies tolerate the virus may help avoid this damage to organs and lead to better health outcomes. This means limiting damage and promoting repair of the lung and other organs, which Ayres thinks can be accomplished in various ways, such as with drugs that manipulate normal metabolism and repair processes in the body.

“With each future pandemic, we won’t know the enemy until it is upon us, so we likely will not have an effective vaccine or anti-virals at the ready,” Ayres said. “But our work suggests that finding ways to help patients tolerate infections generally will enable us to defend against the next pandemic, when it comes.”


Gut-check moment: “When I heard that hospitals around the world were making triage plans for the limited life support available for patients, I felt scared for the world.’”

Personal view: In 2015, Ayres lost her dad to sepsis, an infection that caused the same organ damage in him as COVID-19 is causing in its patients. “People shouldn’t be dying from an infection just because we haven’t been approaching the problem from all necessary angles. We need to be doing better and that’s why I do what I do.”

Kristian Andersen

Professor, Scripps Research

Scripps Research immunologist Kristian Andersen is involved in the global effort to pinpoint the circumstances under which the Chinese coronavirus moves from person to person. (Don Boomer/Don Boomer)


Hundreds of thousands of scientific papers are published each year. Comparatively few draw a lot of readers. Even fewer attract millions of people — which is the reaction Andersen got after he published a paper in Nature Medicine on March 17 built around one question: What is the origin of the coronavirus?

“We could see that it is a SARS-like virus, but where did it come from?” Andersen asked. “And when did it arise? Has it existed for awhile or is it recent. And is it spreading via humans?”

Andersen and his collaborators determined that the novel coronavirus is the product of natural evolution, a discovery that helped scientists understand what they’re dealing with. The finding also was of broad interest to the public. Many people had read that the virus was created in a lab as a bio-weapon. The rumor led to other rumors that spread rapidly online. Andersen’s paper helped slap the rumors down.

He is now exploring how the virus is spreading within the United States, including in San Diego County.


Gut-check moment: “In the beginning, I thought that China would get a handle on this. But then the number of cases exploded in South Korea and in Italy. That’s when I knew that this could become a pandemic.”

Personal view: “This has completely changed my life. My wife’s family is in Finland. Mine is in Denmark. It was hard being so far from them, but we could always jump on an airplane. Now, we can’t see them. If we left the country, I don’t know when I’d be able to get back.”

David Pride

Director of the Molecular Microbiology Laboratory, UC San Diego

Dr. David Pride (UC San Diego )


Scientists won’t be able to corral the pandemic unless massive numbers of people undergo testing to determine if they need to be quarantined. And since the beginning, there’s been a shortage of tests.

Pride and his colleagues are developing a variety of in-house tests that are meant to identify people who are infected and still shedding the virus.

It’s a taxing challenge. They’ve had to keep changing tests due to shortages in key chemicals, known as reagents, that are required to conduct the testing.

Gut-check moment: “It happened on Feb. 29 when the Food and Drug Administration allowed labs like mine to develop their own tests. Talk suddenly shifted to action. Everyone wanted to do tests. Everyone needed the same critical testing materials. A run on resources began, with intense competition between labs, institutions and directors who normally are quite collegial. Shortages continue.”


Personal view: Pride’s lab has been shut down, forcing him to work from his home office, in a spare room. It’s a replica of his campus work space.

“I’ve confined myself to my office. I haven’t seen much of my family for a month. But I still worry. If they develop COVID-19, it will be because I brought it home.”

Christine Kirkpatrick

Division Director, Research Data Services, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

Christine Kirkpatrick (Christine Kirkpatrick)


Coronavirus research is generating stupefying amounts of data that’s coming out of dozens of countries in different languages and in different formats, which can be overwhelming for public health officials who are trying to slow the spread of COVID-19 and for scientists working on vaccines.

Kirkpatrick is a computer scientist who is breaking up the digital bottlenecks.

“My team and I provide places to store and process research data,” Kirkpatrick said. “The supercomputer is the sawmill. Researchers bring their trees (info gathered in their research) to turn into lumber (data). My team takes the lumber and stacks it up (we store it), or provides tools to transform it into new things — from a ladder to a house. We are the lumberyard and we are the carpenters.”

“For COVID-19, I am working with the Virus Outbreak Data Network to connect researchers to ‘sawmills’ and teams like mine. We are also creating ways for hospitals to share their COVID-19 information without letting anyone directly access patients’ private information.”


Gut-check moment: Kirkpatrick was awoken at 2 a.m. on March 11 by a Skype call from a colleague in the Netherlands who had disturbing news. New data was showing that airports could be big vectors for the virus. Kirkpatrick was planning to fly to Australia to give a speech, but immediately canceled. Hours later, actor Tom Hanks, on location in Australia, announced that he had the virus.

Personal view: She often pushes away from her work computer and goes to her sewing machine, where she churns out protective masks for friends and neighbors. Her daughter, Mary, is on standby to sew isolation gowns for a local hospital.

Yanjie Bao

Senior manager, formulation development, Arcturus Therapeutics

Yanjie Bao (Arcturus Therapeutics)


Arcturus is a young San Diego drug company that is racing to develop LUNAR-COV19, the name it gave to its experimental coronavirus vaccine. This summer, Arcturus will begin testing the drug in a small number of humans. Bao is working to scale up production of the vaccine.

“We are fighting time in the lab every day to accelerate this program,” said Bao. “However, the sheer thought of potentially protecting and saving millions of lives around the world with our technology is what drives us.”

Gut-check moment: Bao said she read a Chinese news report in which, “A nurse was feeding water to a stable COVID-19 patient in ICU. The patient said, ‘The water is too hot.’ The nurse smiled (and said), ‘OK, let’s drink it a little bit later.’ She put the glass down. After she turned back, the patient had lost all vital signs, leaving the helpless nurse shocked with tears in her eyes. This is how fragile COVID-19 patients are. This is how people lose their beloved ones.”

Personal view: Bao is a marathon runner who likens the sport to conducting science, saying, “Maybe everybody can run the first 20 miles. But who can last for the last 6.2 miles without slowing down? It will be the one who finds out the truth of the science.”


Jim McKerrow

Dean, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Science, UC San Diego

Jim McKerrow (UC San Diego)

McKerrow’s passport took a beating decades ago when he began roaming through places including Africa, Brazil and Central America to study how parasites infect people with diseases, such as malaria. It was gruesome work. “I remember a boy in the Sudan who was in a coma from malaria,” McKerrow said. “It got to me.”

He began studying molecules that might be able to destroy a parasite’s ability to replicate in its host, work that’s helped produce promising drugs. Today, McKerrow is doing the same thing. Only now he’s focusing on molecules that might disable the coronavirus. “We’d have to kill the virus, then test it in animals, then on people. It will take time. But we’re working fast.”


Gut-check moment: “I was aware the situation in China was bad. I realized it was really bad when we heard about the first positive COVID patient and death in northern Italy. The virus had gotten out of Hubei province. It was a pandemic, and the virus was coming here. We would all be affected — family and friends, neighbors, our city, state and country.

“As a scientist, I would need to do even more, to use every tool I had to help stop and kill the virus.”

Personal view: “I worry about my son and daughter-in-law, who live in Manhattan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. They’re not supposed to go anywhere, not even the store. My son thought about going to Connecticut. But he stayed in New York. Now, he uses Zoom to have virtual happy hours online with his friends. It is very concerning to my wife and I. On a personal level we wanted him far from Manhattan. But on a public health level we realized his decision was the right one.”