In The News

The University of Arizona's COVID-19 vaccination site reached a milestone over the weekend, surpassing 100,000 doses administered. The site has now administered a total of 102,734 doses of COVID-19 vaccine, President Robert C. Robbins announced during the virtual weekly briefing on the university's COVID-19 status. The announcement came on the same day the university is transitioning to Stage 3 of its instructional plan, allowing courses of up to 100 students to meet in person.

In this episode, hosts Brooke Moreno and Sean Cadin talk with Dr. Robert Jackson about his BIO5 and Canadian fellowships, HPV and COVID-19 vaccines, and his desire to share the scientific method with the public.

Together, the BIO5 Institute and the UArizona Commission on the Status of Women funded two high-impact projects aimed to provide resources and mentorship.

We’re highlighting our researchers’ efforts against this major cause of death and disability in the United States during National Traumatic Brain Injury Month.

Longtime University of Arizona supporters and volunteers Humberto and Czarina Lopez have given the University of Arizona $3.5M to establish two endowed chairs. To the Sarver Heart Center, a gift of $2M has been provided to the UArizona Sarver Heart Center where Dr. Carol Gregorio, co-director of Sarver Heart Center, head of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and BIO5 member, is the inaugural chair holder. The Lopezes directed $1.5M to establish the Dhaliwal-HSLopez Chair in Accounting at the Eller College of Management in honor of Dan Dhaliwal, a 1977 alumnus, who was head of the accounting department from 1996 until his passing in 2016.

The university plans to move to Stage 3 the week of March 29, which will allow classes of up to 100 students to meet face to face, President Robert C. Robbins said Monday in his weekly virtual update on the university's COVID-19 status. It was announced that beginning Wednesday, March 24, at 8 a.m., any Arizonan age 16 or older will be able to register for a vaccination appointment at state sites, including the UArizona POD. New appointments at the state PODs will be released every Friday for the following week. Dr. Robbins also applauded recent research co-authored by Dr. Michael Worobey, head of the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, on the origins of the novel coronavirus, likely circulating undetected for up to two months before the first human cases of COVID-19 were described in Wuhan, China.

Researchers working to show when and how the virus first emerged in China calculate that it probably did not infect the first human being until October 2019 at the very earliest. Their models showed something else: It almost didn't make it as a pandemic virus. Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the seafood market in Wuhan -- the place the pandemic appears to have begun -- gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe. We now know that the COVID-19 virus had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established, says Dr. Michael Worobey, BIO5 associate director and professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

Match Day, which annually occurs on the third Friday in March, caps off four years of intense study, volunteering, research, clerkships, sub-internships and clinical rotations for medical and pharmacy students. Separate ceremonies were held for students in the College of Medicine – Tucson and College of Medicine – Phoenix, where students tore open their match envelopes privately and then joined events that were livestreamed online to announce their picks.

On March 15, Dr. Bonnie LaFleur discussed COVID-19 testing, vaccination, and forming social cores as part of the Precision Wellness in the Time of COVID-19 series.

A new study dates emergence of the virus that causes COVID-19 to as early as October 2019. Simulations also suggest that in most cases, zoonotic viruses die out naturally before causing a pandemic.

UArizona sleep researchers are working to tackle insomnia, sleep apnea and pandemic-induced "coronasomnia."

With a $3.3M dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francesca Polverino will investigate unique B cell responses in patients with emphysema, a subtype of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

This is true of all vaccines: Their protective effects take several days or weeks to kick in. It’s the reason we get our flu shots in the fall, well before the height of respiratory-virus season, and it’s why health officials often recommend that vaccines required for travel, such as those that ward off yellow fever, be administered about a month or more in advance. Vaccination, and the defenses it affords, is less a singular event than a series of steps on a shifting landscape.

Training tomorrow’s cancer researchers is a responsibility taken personally by all University of Arizona Cancer Center scientists and staff at the College of Medicine – Tucson. With the help fo T32 grants through the National Cancer Institute, the center continues to train the next generation of cancer scientists with help from UArizona researchers like BIO5 members Drs. Clara Curiel, Gregory Rogers, Cindy Miranti, Juanita Merchant, Curtis Thorne, and Justin Wilson.

Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy leads the Arizona team tackling the pandemic’s outsize effect on racial and ethnic minority communities across the country.

With two years of financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Dr. Robert Jackson will work to advance knowledge in the basic sciences and boost his academic career aspirations.

In recent years, there’s been a push by pharma to find nonaddictive pain therapies. In 2006, scientists described the curious case of a Pakistani boy who seemed immune to pain. It was discovered that the SCN9A gene provides instructions for making a “sodium channel” found in nerve cells that transmits pain signals to the brain, acting like a volume knob for pain. Now, a biotech startup wants to mimic this mutation to treat people with chronic pain using CRISPR. Dr. Rajesh Khanna, UArizona Pharmacology professor and BIO5 member who specializes in the study of chronic pain, weighs in on the research surrounding the Nav1.7 channel and use of CRISPR therapy.

UArizona epidemiologist and BIO5 member Dr. Kristen Pogreba-Brown discusses the school's POD vaccine site and the volunteer efforts needed to maintain its high-capacity. Volunteers are currently needed in both medical and non-medical roles as the site transition to being a 24/7 distribution center.