volunteerism
Bringing Out the Best in Us During the Pandemic
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Sheltering at home for more than two months has made many of us acutely aware of just how much we miss getting out and interacting with other human beings. For some, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has also triggered a more selfless need: to be a good neighbor to the most vulnerable among us and help them stay well, both mentally and physically, during this trying time.
The term “good neighbor” definitely applies to Pablo Vidal-Ribas Belil, a postdoctoral fellow at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Though Vidal-Ribas has his hands full caring for his 4-year-old son in their condo, which is located near NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, he wasn’t too busy to notice that some of his neighbors were in need of help.
Vidal-Ribas extended a helping hand to pick up groceries and prescriptions for the older woman downstairs, as well as several more of his elderly neighbors. He and other concerned neighbors also began enlisting more volunteers to join a neighborhood coronavirus task force. There are now up to 30 volunteers and sometimes hold virtual meetings.
To try to reach everyone in the more than 950-unit Parkside Condominium community, the group coordinated its activities with the help of the management office. They also issued flyers and email messages via the neighborhood list serv, offering to assist people at greatest risk for COVID-19, including seniors and those with compromised immune systems or other serious conditions, by shopping for essential items and dropping the items off at their doors.
The personal interest and care of Vidal-Ribas also comes with medical expertise: he’s a clinical psychologist by training. Vidal-Ribas, who is originally from Barcelona, Spain, came to the United States four years ago to work with an NIH lab that specializes in the study of depression and related conditions in young people. Last year, Vidal-Ribas moved to NICHD as a Social and Behavioral Sciences Branch Fellow, where he now works with Stephen Gilman. There, he explores prenatal and early developmental factors that contribute to attempts at suicide later in life.
His expertise as a psychologist has come in handy. Vidal-Ribas has found that many of the individuals requesting help with grocery items or prescriptions also want to talk. So, the team’s efforts go a long way toward providing not only basic necessities, but also much-needed social and emotional support.
In recognition of this need, the group has expanded to offer virtual chats and other community activities, such as physically distanced games, conversations, or story times. One talented young volunteer has even offered to give music concerts remotely by request. Folks know they can call on Vidal-Ribas and some of the most active task force volunteers at any time.
Vidal-Ribas reports that they’ve taken great care to follow the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 to ensure that those volunteering their time do so safely. He and other volunteers typically buy for multiple neighbors at once while they do their own personal shopping to reduce the number of outings. They then leave the bags with groceries or prescriptions at their neighbors’ doors with no direct contact. As far as he knows, none of his vulnerable neighbors have come down with COVID-19.
Vidal-Ribas says he’s prepared to continue his volunteer outreach for as long as it takes. And, even when the threat of COVID-19 subsides, he’ll keep on lending a hand to his neighbors. It’s one of the ways he stays connected to his community and grounded within himself during this difficult time. By sharing his story, he hopes it will inspire others to do what they can to help others in need to stay safe and well.
Links:
Coronavirus (COVID-19) (NIH)
Social and Behavioral Sciences Branch Fellows (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/NIH)
Stephen Gilman ((National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/NIH)
Pop-Up Testing Lab Shows Volunteer Spirit Against Deadly Pandemic
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
On March 19, 2020, California became the first U. S. state to issue a stay-at-home order to halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The order shuttered research labs around the state, and thousands of scientists began sheltering at home and shifting their daily focus to writing papers and grants, analyzing data from past experiments, and catching up on their scientific reading.
That wasn’t the case for everyone. Some considered the order as presenting a perfect opportunity to volunteer, sometimes outside of their fields of expertise, to help their state and communities respond to the pandemic.
One of those willing to pitch in is Jennifer Doudna, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and executive director of the school’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a partnership with the University of California, San Francisco (UC San Francisco). She is also recognized as a pioneer in the development of the popular gene-editing technology called CRISPR.
Doudna, an NIH-supported structural biochemist with no experience in virology or clinical diagnostics, decided that she and her IGI colleagues could establish a pop-up testing lab at their facility. Their job: boost the SARS-CoV-2 testing capacity in her community.
It was a great idea, but a difficult one to execute. The first daunting step was acquiring Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification. This U. S. certification ensures that quality standards are met for laboratory testing of human blood, body fluid, and other specimens for medical purposes. CLIA certification is required not only to perform such testing in the IGI lab space, but for Doudna’s graduate students, postdocs, and volunteers to process patient samples.
Still, fate was on their side. Doudna and her team partnered with UC Berkeley’s University Health Services to extend the student health center’s existing CLIA certification to the IGI space. And because of the urgency of the pandemic, federal review of the extension request was expedited and granted in a few weeks.
The next challenge was technological. Doudna’s team had to make sure that its diagnostic system was as good or better than those of other SARS-CoV-2 testing platforms. With great care and attention to lab safety, the team began assembling two parallel workstreams: one a semi-manual method to get going right away and the other a faster, automated, robotic method to transition to when ready.
Soon, patient samples began arriving in the lab to be tested for the presence of genetic material (RNA) from SARS-CoV-2, an indication that a person is infected with the virus. The diagnostic system was also soon humming along, with Doudna’s automated workstream having the capacity to process 384 samples in parallel.
The pop-up lab—known formally as the IGI SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Testing Laboratory—is funded through philanthropy and staffed by more than 50 volunteers from IGI, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and local data-management companies. Starting on April 6, the lab was fully operational, capable of running hundreds of tests daily with a 24-hour turnaround time for results. A positive test requires that at least two out of three SARS-CoV-2 genomic targets return a positive signal, and the method uses de-identified barcoded sample data to protect patient privacy.
Doudna intends to keep the pop-up lab open as long as her community needs it. So far, they’ve provided testing to UC Berkeley students and staff, first responders (including the entire Berkeley Fire Department), and several members of the city’s homeless population. She says that availability of samples will soon be the rate-limiting step in their sample-analysis pipeline and hopes continued partnerships with local health officials will enable them to work at full capacity to deliver thousands of test results rapidly.
Doudna says she’s been amazed by the team spirit of her lab members and other local colleagues who have come together around a crisis. They’ve gotten the job done by contributing their different skills and resources, including behind-the-scenes efforts by the university’s leadership and staff, philanthropists, city officials, and state government workers.
Although Doudna and her team intend to publish their work to help others follow suit [1], she says the experience has also provided her with many intangible rewards. It has highlighted the value of resilience and adaptation, as well as given her a newfound appreciation for the complexity and precision of operations in the commercial clinical labs that are a routine part of our medical care.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have thrust all of us into a time warp, in which weeks sometimes feel like months, there is much to do. The amount of work needed to tame this virus is significant and requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality, which NIH and the biomedical research community have embraced fully.
Doudna is not alone. Other labs around the country are engaged in similar efforts. At the NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD, staff at the clinical laboratory in the Clinical Center rapidly set up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and have now tested more than 1,000 NIH staff. Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard partnered with the city of Cambridge, MA, to pilot COVID-19 surveillance in homeless shelters and skilled nursing and assisted living facilities located there.
Hats off to everyone who goes the extra mile to get us through this tough time. I am so gratified when, guided by compassion and dogged determination of the human spirit, science leads the way and provides much needed hope for our future.
Reference:
[1] Blueprint for a Pop-up SARS-CoV-2 Testing Lab. Innovative Genomics Institute SARS-CoV-2 Testing Consortium, Hockemeyer D, Fyodor U, Doudna JA. 2020. medRxiv. Preprint posted on April 12, 2020.
Links:
Coronavirus (COVID-19) (NIH)
CLIA Law & Regulations (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Innovative Genomic Institute (Berkeley, CA)
Doudna Lab (University of California, Berkeley)
NIH Family Members Giving Back: Toben Nelson
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Toben Nelson (back row, far left) celebrates with his Roseville Raiders after winning Gopher State Tournament of Champions.
Caption: Heather Hammond Nelson
What was Toben Nelson, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist who studies the health risks of alcohol abuse and obesity, doing this summer lugging around a heavy equipment bag after work? Giving back to his community. Nelson volunteered as a coach for the Roseville Raiders, a 13-year-old-and-under traveling baseball team that just wrapped up its season by winning the prestigious Gopher State Tournament of Champions in their age group.
In the fall, Nelson will gear up for hoops as the volunteer president of the Roseville Youth Basketball Association, which provides an opportunity for kids in this Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb to take part in organized sports. Nelson says volunteering grounds him as a scientist. It reminds him every single day that his NIH-supported research back at the office affects real lives and benefits real communities like his own.
NIH Family Members Giving Back: Rebecca Shlafer
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Rebecca Shlafer/Credit: Brady Willette
When Rebecca Shlafer clicks on her office lights each morning at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Minneapolis, she usually has a good idea of what to expect from the day ahead as lead of a nine-person research team that studies the effects of incarceration on children and families. It’s her volunteer work that can be unpredictable.
For the past eight years, this developmental child psychologist has donated her free time to serve as a guardian ad litem for abused or neglected children who’ve been removed from their homes and placed under protective supervision of Minnesota’s Fourth Judicial District. In that volunteer capacity, Shlafer advocates in court for the well-being of the child, but doesn’t foster the youngster or provide any day-to-day care.
NIH Family Members Giving Back: Kafui Dzirasa
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Kafui Dzirasa (front center) with the current group of Meyerhoff Scholars at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Credit: Olubukola Abiona
Kafui Dzirasa keeps an open-door policy in his busy NIH-supported lab at Duke University, Durham, NC. If his trainees have a quick question or just need to discuss an upcoming experiment, they’re always welcome to pull up a chair. The donuts are on him.
But when trainees pop by his office and see he’s out for the day, they have a good idea of what it means. Dzirasa has most likely traveled up to his native Maryland to volunteer as a mentor for students in a college program that will be forever near and dear to him. It’s the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Since its launch in 1988, this groundbreaking program has served as a needed pipeline to help increase diversity in the sciences—with more than 1,000 alumni, including Dzirasa, and 270 current students of all races.
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